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HP ProLiant Virtualization Blade Server To Be Equipped With Samsung Solid State Drives

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Samsung Electronics has announced that its 32 gigabyte (GB) and 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) have been selected, after extensive testing, for use in the  HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. This represents the first time that an SSD has been qualified for use in a server optimized for virtualization. The server is the world’s first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines, and is designed for use in virtualized environments that require significant memory, data storage and network connections to optimize server performance.

By using SSDs instead of hard disk drives, HP is able to free up a significant amount of physical space which can then be allocated for additional DRAM capacity—further improving system performance. The BL495c has 16 DRAM sockets.

The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade eliminates performance bottlenecks in virtual machine hosts. Engineered with more memory and I/O than any other two-processor blade server, the new server has a maximum processor speed of 2.3 GHz and a maximum front-side bus speed of 1 GHz, according to HP, and comes with the option of two SATA SSD storage drives (either 32 or 64 GBs).

The Samsung single-level-cell (SLC) SSD has a (sequential) read speed of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and a (sequential) write speed of 80 MB/s. The SLC SSD’s power consumption is as little as a miniscule 0.5 watt (one-twentieth that of a conventional 15K enterprise rpm hard drive) in active mode and 0.1 watt in sleep mode.

Quest Software Intends To Buy Up to $400 Million of Its Common Stock

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Quest Software recently announced that its board of directors has authorized a modified “Dutch auction” tender offer to repurchase between $135 million and $400 million of its common stock at a price per share expected to be not less than $13.25 and not greater than $15.50.

Based on the midpoint of the price range, this would represent between 9 percent and 26 percent of the shares of Quest common stock currently issued and outstanding. The company anticipates obtaining debt financing in an aggregate principal amount of up to $300 million to provide financing for a portion of the repurchase. If Quest is unable to secure such financing on acceptable terms, Quest still expects to proceed with the tender offer or to commence an open-market repurchase program, but the repurchase would be funded from cash on-hand, subject to applicable California corporate law limitations, and the aggregate size of the repurchase would likely be at the low end of the range stated above.

In light of the recent extreme volatility of trading in the company’s common stock and because the size of the prospective tender offer has yet to be determined, the company’s board of directors will decide the actual price range for the tender offer when such offer is commenced based on all of the circumstances at that time. Quest intends to commence the tender offer or other repurchase program and to announce the final number of shares, the timing and other details of the offer or other program later this month.

The modified “Dutch auction” would allow Quest’s shareholders to tender some or all of their shares at a price within the specified range. Based on the number of shares tendered and the prices specified by the tendering shareholders, Quest will determine the lowest price per share within the range that will enable it to purchase the total number of shares subject to the offer, or such lesser aggregate amount of its common stock that is properly tendered. All shares accepted in the tender offer will be purchased at the same price per share even if a shareholder tendered at a lower price. Vinny Smith, executive chairman of Quest, intends to tender three million shares in the tender offer, which constitutes approximately 9% of the shares beneficially owned by him. We cannot yet determine the extent to which our other directors and executive officers may participate in the tender offer.

With the assistance of the company’s executive management and outside advisors, Quest’s board of directors has evaluated the company’s operations, strategy and expectations and has determined that repurchasing a portion of Quest’s shares of common stock is a prudent use of the company’s financial resources. Quest believes that its current stock price levels do not reflect the current performance or long-term growth prospects of its business. Accordingly, Quest believes that an investment in its own stock at the range of offered prices represents an attractive strategic transaction.

The tender offer, when commenced, will be subject to a number of terms and conditions, including any applicable corporate and regulatory requirements and, in the event of a leveraged tender offer, the receipt of financing described above, all of which terms and conditions will be specified in an offer to purchase to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the date the offer is commenced.

VMware Buys Blue Lane (Updated)

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VMware went shopping and came back home with Cupertino-based Blue Lane Technologies. Despite the lack of press releases, this transaction was confirmed by Mary Ann Gallo, VMware’s head of Global Public Relations. Unfortunately she could not disclose the financial details.

Update: according to Brenon Daly from The 451 Group, the price was around $15 million, and Blue Lane was in search for a buyer since last Summer because of lack of sufficient capital. He also mentions Blue Lane raised “some $18.4m in two rounds of funding”, but our information keeps it at $13.4m.

The acquired company provides solutions that secure virtual and physical data centers. Its solution secures servers and VMs by controlled code execution in the network and taking appropriate countermeasures against traffic aimed at known software vulnerabilities (without signatures).

Blue Lane was quite silent after releasing VirtualShield 4.2 last April. We interviewed Greg Ness, former VP of Marketing with Blue Lane (and avid blogger) and Thierry Evangelista, Technical Director Europe for the company at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

This acquisition confirms VMware’s commitment to virtualization security or VirtSec in short.

Blue Lane was founded in 2002 and has raised $13.4 million to date in two financing rounds from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Matrix Partners. According to Greg Ness, who left the company last July to join Infoblox, Blue Lane has around 40 employees.

Below, you can find 3 embedded videos encompassing a long interview we did with Ness last June when he was still with the company.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 1/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness part 2/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 3/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Thanks to Virtualization.info for the news.

Blue Lane Technologies

CloudCamp Sailing Into Brussels On A Boat (30 October)

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CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

There was one in London previously, and now there’s one being held in (our home town) Brussels on the Biouel boat the 30th of October.

Tarry Singh, Founder & CEO at Avastu, alerted us on the news and will be speaking at the event, as will Q-layer‘s Tom Leyden.

Registration is free of charge, you can sign up for the event right here.

IBM Adds More Virtualization Capabilities to Power Systems, Eyeing Sun and HP

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IBM, which combined its System i and System p server product lines earlier this year, is revamping its Power Systems to offer more systems for enterprise and midmarket customers. The enhancements include additional processors based on the IBM Power Architecture as well as more virtualization capabilities. These IBM Power Systems compete against both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in the Unix market.

IBM is looking to widen its offering for the Unix market with new Power Systems that support more processing cores based on IBM’s Power Architecture as well as new management and virtualization features.

IBM Power Systems were introduced in April as a new set of offerings that combined the older IBM Systems i and System p under one product portfolio. The combination of these two systems gave IBM a set of offerings for enterprises and midmarket companies that not only can run AIX—IBM’s version of Unix—but also Linux and the i OS—the renamed version of the i5/OS operating system.

While the overall Unix market pales in comparison to servers based on x86 processors, this market remains important for three major OEMs: IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. According to Gartner, while shipments of Unix-based servers fell in the second quarter of 2008, worldwide revenue increased nearly 10 percent year over year to about $4.2 billion for the quarter. Not surprisingly, IBM, which has been pushing its Unix platforms beyond the enterprise into the midmarket and even the small and midsize business, saw its revenue increase 29 percent in the second quarter for a total of $1.5 billion.

By combining the two systems into one product portfolio, IBM is looking to further strengthen its position in the Unix market. It was also a way to absorb some losses for IBM, which had seen its System i revenue slip in 2007, while System p continued to grow.

HP has its Integrity Systems that use Intel’s Itanium processors, while Sun, which has been struggling selling its high-end servers, offers its SPARC-based products and Solaris operating system.

IBM listed the starting price of the Power 560 Express with the AIX operating system at $47,216. There was no pricing information for the updated version of the Power 570.

In addition to the new hardware, IBM also rolled out several management and virtualization features of its Power Systems. These include an update for IBM’s PowerVM—the company’s virtualization software for Power Systems—called Active Memory Sharing. While only in beta now, Active Memory Sharing allows the system to access more memory in virtual environments by pooling compute resources between the partitions.

IBM is also offering a new management console called Systems Directory. This management tool works across all three operating systems—Linux, i, and AIX—and allows IT managers to control and check the resources both in the physical hardware and within virtual environments.

Finally, IBM is rolling out an Enterprise version of the AIX operating system, which includes the OS itself plus Tivoli and PowerVM software.

Storage Company Nexsan Releases Assureon 6.0

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Nexsan on Tuesday debuted a new version of its archiving system, Assureon 6.0, which builds in scalability and security features, such as the ability to separate archiving between users.

The updated Assureon software includes Nexsan’s AutoMaid green technology, which is intended to reduce power consumption in a hosted datacentre. The Assureon system itself consists of disk storage, archiving software and servers in a single rack.

Nexsan uses its own method of storing data, called Maid (Massive Arrays of Idle Disks), which exploits the fact most disk arrays can be almost constantly rotating and therefore using energy. Maid uses smaller disks, but more of them, so that at any one time most of the disks are idle. According to Nexsan, the method reduces energy consumption overall.

Nexsan said Assureon 6.0 also features an innovative content-addressable storage (CAS) capability, which allows customers to virtualise a system into “an essentially unlimited number of physically secure archives”.

The Assureon system competes with iSCSI storage area network packages from companies such as EqualLogic PS 5000 and LeftHand Networks. Nexsan has not yet provided a price for Assureon 6.0.