Virtualization.com

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

Double-Take Software Picks Up emBoot for $10 Million in Cash

by 1 Comment

Double-Take Software announced (PDF) today the acquisition of emBoot, experts in network booting technology. emBoot network boot technologies allow organizations to easily assign and re-assign computing workloads to any available Windows or Linux physical servers or desktops or any virtual machine in their environment.

The acquisition follows Double-Take Software’s development of full system protection and recovery technologies as well as the acquisition of CDP recovery with TimeData as key components of the company’s Dynamic Infrastructure Strategy that aims to optimize, protect, monitor and recover workloads on any resource, anywhere and to any point in time.

The technology acquired with emBoot allows separation of the operating system, applications and data associated with a workload from the hardware it runs on. IT organizations can now move those workloads around in a matter of minutes whether it is because a disaster has occurred, a data center is moving, the company has decided to virtualize its infrastructure or an application needs more capacity.

Moving entire workloads around independent of the underlying physical or virtual hardware they are running on has been painfully complex and time consuming for IT administrators. By storing workloads on networked storage resources and making them available to physical and virtual servers on-demand, Double-Take’s new solutions now make it is easy for IT administrators to move critical applications and data according to their value and desired service level agreements and to optimize the use of test, production and disaster recovery computing resources.

emBoot’s technology is based on the growing iSCSI storage standard (Internet Small Computer System Interface). Double-Take’s new offering will provide two key capabilities for customers in support of movement to a more dynamic IT infrastructures:

  • Using any iSCSI compliant storage solution, those customers will be able to create bootable images of their production workloads and use a centralized workload management console to assign those workloads to any available physical or virtual machines in their environment.
  • Optionally, companies will be able to build a software-based iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) using standard server hardware and storage using included iSCSI Target software.

IT professionals will be able to quickly create an IP SAN in minutes using commodity server hardware and disks they may already have. The iSCSI-based network booting features will make it easy to migrate workloads to new hardware, to virtual machines or back based on changing demands.

The company acquired emBoot for a total cash purchase price of $10 million.

Double-Take Software

[Source: Hypervoria]

Virtutech Boasts Virtualized Software Development Leadership

by Leave a Comment

Virtutech,  provider of virtualized software development (VSD) solutions, today announced new metrics that solidify the company’s position as the VSD platform vendor of choice for electronic systems developers.

Virtutech claims it is experiencing a growing demand for its Simics platform across all dimensions of the marketplace with:

  • More than 10,000 Simics end users based on licenses issued
  • More than 100 processors and virtual platforms deployed
  • More than 1,000 devices modeled on Simics and immediately available in the platform model repository
  • Simics has become the de facto commercial standard for enablement and development on Power Architecture;
  • More than 30 Fortune 500 companies rely on Virtutech.

Virtutech recently announced version 4.0 of its flagship Simics development platform, which debuted Simics Accelerator. Simics Accelerator is designed specifically to boost performance and scalability of large-scale simulations, including features such as memory page sharing and multi-threading support, which leverages the multi-core aspects of their host environment.

Early in June, Virtutech announced the fastest mixed level of modeling simulation supporting SystemC as well as C-based models with its Simics SystemC Bridge. This was followed shortly thereafter by Virtutech and Freescale’s joint announcement of a Hybrid Simulation capability to solve the critical need performance analysis and optimization of the system-on-chip (SoC) model when developing for complex multicore processors.

Virtutech appointed David Pefley as the company’s first chief financial officer. Pefley has more than 20 years experience in financial management, most recently as senior vice president, CFO and board member of Yield Dynamics where he led the company to a successful acquisition. He has served in various financial management positions, including corporate controller at KLA-Tencor Corp for 10 years.

Virtutech

Industry Moves: Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa to VMLogix, Jason Langone to IGI

by Leave a Comment

  • VMLogix, provider of virtual lab automation solutions, today announced that Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa have joined the company as VP of marketing and VP of worldwide sales, respectively. Pileski was most recently director of corporate marketing for Novell, which he joined with the acquisition of PlateSpin. Yanagawa was VP of inside sales for the EMC Software Division prior to the move.
  • Infinite Group announced that IGI has promoted Jason Langone to the newly-created position of Director of Virtualization Services. Prior to joining IGI, Mr. Langone held senior technical positions with Charles E. Smith, Citrix Systems, Tyco Healthcare, Computershare and the U.S. Census Bureau.
VMLogix

Infinite Group

Amazon Loves CloudStatus, And We’ve Got The Proof on Video

by 2 Comments

At the O’Reilly Velocity conference we attended last month, Hyperic was there to hype the launch of Cloudstatus, which aspires to become the monitoring tool for cloud providers similar to what Netcraft is for’classic’ hosting providers. Get the lowdown on Hyperic and CloudStatus in this video (two parts) from Jon Travis (Principal Engineer) and Xavier Soltero (co-founder and CEO).

See part 1 of the movie here on Vimeo, but scroll down for the best part!

As we are living in the ice age of cloud computing, glitches (like the recent outage of Amazon S3) are to be expected and it must be said that Amazon managed to fix its ecosystem relatively fast and openly reported on the underlying problem .

An interesting question is posted by Reuven Cohen on his blog about the use of federated network protocols within cloud services and the gossip protocol that caused Amazon’s WS downtime on June 24.

“…We have been big fans of use of XMPP for federated communications within our Enomalism cloud platform for multi cloud communications (Wide Area Cloud). XMPP is interesting because it natively solves a number of federation problems within a tried and tested framework. One of the biggest benefits to the use of a gossip protocol lies in the the robust spread of information and the exponential nature of it’s sharing of information within a large number of machines…”

At Virtualization.com, we intend to report on cloud initiatives too, since all these Platform-as-a-Service providers (Google App Engine being the exception to this rule) are enabled by virtualization technology. We expect to see several more competitive statistical analysis tools for various cloud service providers to emerge in the near future. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) blazing the cloud trail, Hyperic picked them to start reporting on via CloudStatus. But Google App Engine and (Sales)force.com seem target platforms to follow. So Amazon’s trouble with being first, is they are first in line to be publicely reported on too. This also means the PR and sales people at Cloudstatus have a busy time issuing press releases and contacting impacted prospects whenever Amazon experiences a glitch or failure.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm ventilated the common fear that:

“… Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

Being curious and knowing Amazon only speaks through CEO Jeff Bezos or CTO Werner Vogels, we walked up to the latter and were happy to learn Amazon actually loves CloudStatus. He took a step back right afterwards, but why not just watch the video to see his response to the CloudStatus launch?


Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

On a sidenote: Hyperic’s newly launched CloudStatus detected the outage at 8:45am PDT, a full 20 minutes before Amazon posted that they were aware of the issue, at 9:05 PDT on http://status.aws.amazon.com/. CloudStatus saw several server errors coming from the majority of their S3 and SQS monitoring agents, in addition to other problems with EC2 (lots of EC2 zombies being created) that may have been related.

Like hurricane warning systems, while Hyperic CloudStatus could not have prevented the S3 outage, it was able to provide enough of a “storm” warning for users to take action. The company will be adding additional cloud services to CloudStatus in the coming months, next up is Google App Engine.

Hyperic

KACE Releases Virtual Appliance Enabling Remote OS Provisioning

by Leave a Comment

KACE, a management appliance company we covered earlier this year, today announced the industry’s first virtual remote appliance to deliver remote operating system (OS) provisioning. As part of its KBOX family of appliances, the new KBOX Virtual Remote Appliance allows a central KBOX to extend full systems provisioning to remote offices, helping organizations to eliminate the cost and time associated with manual imaging approaches.

Consisting of an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance that resides in an organization’s remote offices, Virtual Remote Appliances work in conjunction with a central KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance to push out entire OS deployments to offices outside of a corporate network, oftentimes hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

By automating machine provisioning at remote offices, KACE gives IT administrators a centralized way to execute deployment tasks, such as hardware independent network OS installation, disk imaging, software distribution, configuration management, and recovery at any location.
Virtual Remote Appliances allow the KBOX to provision systems in any remote office, including the ability to:
  • Provision from a centralized deployment library of operating systems, disk images, drivers, and applications;
  • Perform hardware independent network OS installation (scripted installation);
  • Deploy disk images;
  • Utilize a GUI-based pre-installation environment for the recovery of corrupted systems;
  • Deliver full reporting capabilities for system history, installation, and images.
Virtual Remote Appliances are available now and included at no additional cost with the purchase of a KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance.
KACE

Secerno Introduces Database Security Solution for Virtual Environments

by Leave a Comment

Database security provider Secerno today announced the availability of its Secerno.SQL database activity monitoring and blocking solution as a virtualized appliance on the VMware platform. This, according to the company, marks the first availability of its appliance-based database protection in a virtualized environment, allowing enterprises the same database protection afforded by hardware yet with the utilisation, management and cost benefits of a virtualized application.

Secerno’s virtualized database protection product is powered by its patent-pending SynoptiQ technology. The company chose VMware’s technology platform based on its penetration into more than 20,000 corporate customers.

“This unique announcement comes at an exciting time for Secerno. We have just secured funding that allows us to respond to market opportunities and customer demand,” said Steve Hurn, CEO of Secerno. “In this case, we are bringing Secerno to a virtualised environment to offer organisations more variety in their deployments and reduce their overall costs in terms of resources and expenses. Virtualisation is emerging as a key strategy for companies, and we are delighted to be the first to offer this option for database activity monitoring and blocking.”

Secerno.SQL for VMware is set to be available this quarter.

Secerno