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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

IBM Expands Storage Virtualization for SMBs

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IBM today announced its storage virtualization software will be packaged for small and medium sized (SMB) businesses, one of the faster growing parts of the storage marketplace.

The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications. It can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.
The new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Entry Edition helps SMBs manage that growth and improve the return on their storage investments while also helping simplify operations. SVC Entry Edition is built on more affordable hardware intended specifically to run the new SVC Entry Edition software which delivers the same rich functional capabilities as the regular SVC software. As a result, IBM Business Partners already familiar with SVC will immediately be ready to support clients using SVC Entry Edition. SVC Entry Edition is licensed by the number of disk drives virtualized rather than by terabyte to make it more accessible and affordable. With this new type of licensing, IBM Business Partners can easily package new disk storage and SVC together to deliver complete storage solutions to clients.
Since its introduction in 2003, IBM has shipped over 14,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,600 SVC systems. Complementing the announcement today of SVC Entry Edition, IBM is announcing it has accomplished a new world record SPC disk-based benchmark that demonstrates the extraordinary scalability of SVC and continues IBM’s leadership in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. The new benchmark not only beats the previous SVC measurement but does so with IBM’s new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk thin provisioning technology enabled.(2) The new SPC-1 benchmark of SVC running with IBM DS4700 disk supports 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS(TM) per second.
IBM is also announcing the interoperability of SVC with the new IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM System Storage DS5000 and the IBM System z/VSE. New interoperability support for SVC also includes Microsoft Hyper-V, HDS Universal Storage Platform and HP XP20000/XP24000.
SVC Entry Edition is planned to be generally available on November 21.

Hyperic Announces Partner Network Program and Fresh European OEM Partner

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Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced the Hyperic Partner Network Program, a comprehensive and tiered expansion of its existing global partner program. This enables companies seeking to deliver value-added management solutions to their customers a faster, proven road to success by incorporating Hyperic’s software offerings.

These include web application performance monitoring software, Hyperic HQ; cross-platform, cross-language library and command-line tool SIGAR; and CloudStatus, Hyperic’s latest product for monitoring the performance of cloud computing environments.

The Hyperic Partner Network Program offers several tiers designed to meet the differing needs of companies interested in white labeling, reselling, or referring Hyperic HQ, SIGAR or CloudStatus. The program also recognizes partners contributing to the Hyperic community and its technology, with the launch of “Hyperic Ready” certification.

Hyperic has more than 30 strategic partnerships around the world, with established and significant momentum in federal and European markets. Hyperic’s recent news includes an OEM partnership with Dalet Digital Media Solutions, a French media monitoring company who built a broadcast industry vertical monitoring and management solution using Hyperic HQ Enterprise, and a reseller partnership with SOPERA for distribution and support in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The expanded Hyperic Partner Network Program comprises four categories:the “Powered by Hyperic” OEM Partner Program, “Hyperic Certified” Reseller Partner Program, The Hyperic Referral Program and “Hyperic Ready” Program for Software Vendors.

Hyperic

DataCore’s SANsymphony and SANmelody Certified On Citrix XenServer 5

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DataCore Software, provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that its SANsymphony and SANmelody products have been certified on Citrix‘s newest XenServer 5 release as virtual SAN appliances, as well as on both standard servers and blades. With XenServer 5, Citrix has optimized Citrix XenApp performance on XenServer virtual machines. According to Citrix, this enables XenApp workloads to be virtualized with as little as 7% overhead and as many as 73% more users than XenApp workloads virtualized with competing products. Citrix XenApp (formerly Citrix Presentation Server) is used by more than 100 million users and 99% of the Fortune Global 500.

DataCore Virtual SAN appliance and storage virtualization software are certified for XenServer 5
Through its own rigorous testing, Citrix has certified that both SANsymphony and SANmelody software support XenServer 5 virtual machines as shared storage pools with advanced storage virtualization functions critical to demanding virtual server environments. The manufacturer-independent features include fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, remote replication to disaster recovery sites, non-disruptive virtual data migration, thin provisioning and high speed caching for performance acceleration.
DataCore Software

StorMagic Gets SM Series Certified on VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i

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StorMagic, a developer of iSCSI SAN management software, today announced that the StorMagic SM Series has been certified with VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i. The StorMagic SM Series is now listed on the VMware Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide, allowing joint customers to benefit from the latest VMware server virtualization features while being able to easily manage shared storage in their existing virtualized environments.

The StorMagic SM Series software brings enterprise-level iSCSI SAN capabilities to customer environments without the high price tag, allowing organizations with limited IT resources and growing data storage demands to store, share, manage and protect data through a single, easy-to-use interface. Mission-critical storage functions such as data migration, consolidation, and management are now accessible at a lower cost without compromising on performance and without the need for specialized storage skills.

This certification is part of the VMware Storage Certification Program, which is available to VMware Technology Alliance Partners. StorMagic is a Select VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP).

VKernel Ships Capacity Analyzer 2.0 Virtual Appliance

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VKernel Corporation announced today the company is now shipping its Capacity Analyzer 2.0 virtual appliance.  New features and functionality include Disk I/O statistics, a more intuitive user interface, and enhanced scalability to ensure the optimal performance of the most demanding VMware ESX environments.

Capacity Analyzer continuously and proactively monitors shared CPU, memory, and storage resource utilization trends in VMware ESX environments across hosts, clusters, and resource pools.  By quickly identifying current and future performance-impacting capacity bottlenecks, Capacity Analyzer provides the critical resource utilization data to properly plan and grow the virtual server infrastructure, ensures optimal service level agreements (SLAs), and lowers the cost per virtual machine to realize a faster return on investment (ROI).

VKernel’s patent-pending Capacity Analyzer technology provides users with a unique single-screen dashboard view of their complete VMware environment and dynamically updates as additions and changes are made.  From the Capacity Analyzer dashboard, users have the advanced analytics to monitor and manage shared resource capacity, allocation, and utilization.

The VKernel Capacity Analyzer virtual appliance is currently available with pricing starting at $199 per CPU socket for the standard edition. There’s also a free, full-featured 14-day trial version available from the VKernel website.

VKernel

Citrix’s Open Source “Project Kensho” Tech Preview Now Available Under LGPL

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Citrix recently announced “Project Kensho,” which would deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT managers to easily create hypervisor-independent, portable enterprise application workloads.

Well, it looks like Citrix just released the first technical preview of project Kensho under the LGPL license.

Because the tools are based on an industry standard schema, customers are ensured a rich ecosystem of options for virtualization.  And because of the open-standard format and special licensing features in OVF, customers can seamlessly move their current virtualized workloads to either XenServer or Windows Server 2008, enabling them to distribute virtual workloads to the platform of choice while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the underlying licensing requirements for each virtual appliance.

Citrix also announced a partnership with rPath to build and deliver new virtual appliances by assembling Linux packages “like Lego bricks”. The two are working together to allow rPath’s rBuilder to inject OVF virtual appliances directly into Xen-based cloud computing environments, like Amazon EC2. This collaboration will allow Linux and Windows based OVF appliances created on XenServer, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 to be installed and run in the cloud and managed through their entire lifecycle.

Citrix Systems