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

SplashTop Maker DeviceVM Raises $15 Million in Series C Funding Round

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DeviceVM, maker of the Splashtop instant-on environment, announced today a $15 million Series C round of funding led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. Existing investors including Storm Ventures, DFJ Dragon, Tim Draper, and Larry Augustin also participated in this Series C investment, demonstrating continued commitment to DeviceVM’s growth.

“Splashtop is a game-changing product in the personal computing space,” said NEA partner Peter Sonsini, who previously led NEA’s investment in XenSource (acquired by Citrix Systems), and was an executive at VMware prior to joining NEA. “We are excited to invest in a revolutionary product and a team like DeviceVM.”

Warren Lazarow and Paul Sieben of O’Melveny & Myers LLP represented DeviceVM in the transaction.

DeviceVM

Phoenix Technologies Talks Up HyperSpace Hypervisor at IDF

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Phoenix Technologies today announced that the first open demonstrations of Phoenix FailSafe, its anti-theft and data protection firmware-based product, and its embedded virtualization platform, Phoenix HyperSpace, are being held at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) August 19-21, 2008 in San Francisco.

At IDF, Phoenix also unveiled Phoenix MicroCore, Phoenix’s newest BIOS designed for the new Intel Atom processor for netbooks and nettops.

Update: a LinuxWorld keynote given by Simon Crosby unveils that the engine behind HyperCore is actually Xen. The presentation also revealed that other major vendors are using Xen for their upcoming desktop hypervisors.

Phoenix HyperCore is an embedded hypervisor which allows an independent Linux-based operating system called HyperSpace to run specialized core services side-by-side with Windows Vista. The HyperSpace platform provides a unique computing environment called ManageSpace that PC designers and security innovators can use to host remote management and security applications that are available before, during and after Windows boot up and shut down. Operating like self-contained appliances, these embedded applications such as anti-virus and secure browsing provide stronger protection than is currently available on PCs.
We recently wrote that Phoenix is integrating HyperSpace into NEC notebooks as one of the first manufacterers.
Enhanced by Intel based-processors enabling virtualization technologies, Phoenix HyperSpace provides a secure foundation of ’embedded simplicity.’ PC OEMs can now offer highly-efficient, instantly available applications that promise to deliver new levels of security, up-time, system reliability, remote management, and ease-of-use to PC users.
Phoenix Technologies

VirtualLogix VLX Adds Support for Intel-Based Mobile Internet Devices

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VirtualLogix (previous coverage) today announced that its VLX virtualization solution will be supporting the latest Intel Atom processor Z5XX series-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

Device makers using VLX on these MIDs can simplify hardware designs, reduce costs and enhance the end-user experience through improved quality of voice, multimedia services and stronger security capabilities. VirtualLogix VLX also offers complete power management support for virtualized environments, which reduces MIDs’ overall energy consumption.

The VLX hypervisor integrates transparently into a Windows or a Linux-based MID with no re-installation of the native operating system (OS) and no intrusion into the existing user environment. As a result, customers can use VLX’s flexible software architecture to securely separate critical applications while boosting the quality of service offerings. Additionally, by servicing the virtual appliances while the main application OS and associated hardware resources are not in use, VLX improves power consumption management.

The demand for next-generation devices is expanding. In a recent report, “Mobile Internet Device (MID) & Chip Market Opportunities,” Forward Concepts forecasted MID shipment growth from 305,000 units in 2008 to 39.6 million units in 2012.

Workspace Service Morphs Into Nimbus 2.0

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Grid is dead, and reinventing itself as Cloud. All kidding aside, the idea of providing a virtual machine instance as a service in the Grid rather than just CPU time with the appropriate environment and libraries to be used by different users isn’t new; it actually makes a lot of sense to provide e.g. a working virtual machine instance for a complex scientific application, which is a lot easier than having to document the correct setup for fellow researchers to implement.

The Workspace Service project part of Globus.org has just announced it’s rebranding and releasing the 2.0 version of what will now be known as Nimbus.

One of the core services of the Virtual Workspace project was orchestrating the deployment of VMs on remote resources as well as the release versioning. Today, Nimbus is a set of tools that together provide a “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS) cloud computing solution targeted specifically towards scientific applications. Many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus allows a client to lease remote resources by deploying virtual machines (VMs) on those resources and configuring them to represent an environment desired by the user.

It was formerly known as the “Virtual Workspace Service” (VWS) but the “workspace service” is technically just one the components in the software collection.

Just as Eucalyptus, it is capable of managing clients that are compatible with the Amazon EC2 service.

Open Source Virtualization management platforms like Nimbus , Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and openQRM are catching on. This probably isn’t the last one we’ll learn about. The question is which one will survive eventually.

Demand Media Picks 3PAR for Scaling Utility Storage

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3PAR, provider of utility storage, announced today that Demand Media has chosen 3PAR Utility Storage to support its rapidly growing social media business. (see our previous coverage on 3PAR)

Demand Media uses its network of vertically-oriented web properties to connect content creators and large audiences with advertisers. To improve infrastructure agility, storage scalability, and capacity utilization over the data lifecycle, the social media company has implemented multiple 3PAR InServ Storage Servers in addition to 3PAR Thin Provisioning and 3PAR Dynamic Optimization software. Demand Media has also chosen to deploy an entire virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint, which combines 3PAR Utility Storage with products from HP and VMware to create a complete utility computing environment.

Due to the rapid expansion of its business, Demand Media found that storage scalability and flexible, easy database and storage management were becoming critical requirements. To keep up with growth, Demand Media determined that it needed to enhance its server and storage infrastructure. The social media company promptly sought out a highly-virtualized server and storage platform that would enable greater flexibility and scalability than their previous infrastructure. They ultimately decided to implement 3PAR Utility Storage and a complete virtual datacenter based on the 3cV blueprint. “3cV” stands for the combination of the 3PAR InServ Storage Server, HP BladeSystem c-Class, and VMware Infrastructure.

To support their virtual datacenter, Demand Media chose to deploy the 3PAR InServ S800 Storage Server with 188 terabytes of storage and two 3PAR InServ E200 Storage Servers with 36 terabytes of storage. Demand Media’s 3PAR deployment also utilizes several 3PAR software products including 3PAR Thin Provisioning, 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, 3PAR Virtual Copy, and 3PAR System Reporter.

3PAR

GoGrid Takes Windows Server 2008 Into The Cloud

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GoGrid announced today the immediate availability of 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008 within its Cloud Computing infrastructure. Parent company ServePath is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and launched Windows Server 2008 dedicated hosting in February of this year.

With this release, GoGrid becomes one of the first Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to offer Windows Server 2008 “in the cloud.” GoGrid customers can now deploy Windows Server 2008 servers in just a few minutes for as little as 19 cents an hour.

Initial Windows Server 2008 offerings on GoGrid include both 32-bit and 64-bit preconfigured templates. GoGrid users select the desired operating system and then choose preconfigured templates in order to minimize time to deploy. Pre-configurations include:

  • Windows Server 2008 Standard with Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7)
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard with IIS 7 and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
  • Windows Server 2008 Standard with IIS 7, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and ASP.NET

GoGrid continues to offer Cloud servers for Windows Server 2003 as well as various Linux distributions and will continue to expand GoGrid’s “Control in the Cloud” offerings in the future.