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

IBM Snaps Up Storage Provider Diligent Technologies

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IBM today announced it has acquired Diligent Technologies, a privately held storage “de-duplication” technology company headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts with research and development located in Tel Aviv, Israel. Diligent’s technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit of the IBM Systems and Technology Group. Financial terms were not disclosed, but The Register picked up rumors the deal was in the $200 million price range.

Diligent develops in-line data de-duplication software that is integrated with server and storage infrastructures to help organizations significantly reduce the amount and cost of physical storage required in data centers. From the press release:

Data de-duplication is an emerging technology that organizations are investing in today and Diligent’s innovative technology provides a single solution to support data protection, archive and data-retention applications – all while maintaining the integrity of the data.

The Diligent acquisition will be an important part of IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. The new model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

The acquisition of Diligent maps to the overall IBM enterprise strategy of developing more efficient, cost effective data centers and will further extend IBM’s storage portfolio.Combined with IBM, Diligent’s data de-duplication technology and solutions will:

  • address the unique data de-duplication requirements of enterprise clients for maximum in-line performance, scalability and data integrity;
  • complement clients’ installed backup/recovery applications (e.g. Tivoli Storage Manager and others);
  • reduce the amount of time required to backup and recover information;
  • enable the economical electronic transmission of back-up and archive data from primary to remote disaster recovery sites;
  • reduce the amount of physical storage required to help reduce costs and energy consumption

“Diligent’s data de-duplication software is a critical technology that will be integrated into the IBM Storage portfolio to further extend our information infrastructure strategy, allowing our clients to eliminate redundant data and streamline the infrastructure required to support their business – which can result in dramatic improvements in data center efficiency,” said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage. “Diligent’s industry-proven data de-duplication offerings are exceptionally suited for mid-range and enterprise clients, uniquely combining in-line performance, scalability and data integrity and extends IBM’s strong portfolio of strategic offerings that will help our clients reduce infrastructure costs, improve energy efficiency in the data center, and enable them to fully utilize their information on demand.”

Diligent will become part of the IBM System Storage brand of offerings.

Earlier this month, IBM announced its intent to acquire FilesX, a provider of continuous data protection software for mission-critical applications and remote offices.

Diligent, which has secured close to $47 million in funding, previously served as EMC’s Israel research and development lab before being spun-out from the storage firm in 2002.

YuuZoo Deploys Virtual Iron Solution To Streamline IT Infrastructure

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Virtual Iron today announced that YuuZoo, one of the world’s premier, mobile content aggregators, is deploying Virtual Iron’s solution across its content management system and mobile content distribution platforms in Singapore and the US. The company expects significant benefit from the software, including reduction of its server environment by almost half, streamlined management of its computing environment, easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users, and cost-efficient business continuity capabilities. YuuZoo is working with ICSP Solutions out of Singapore to deploy the Virtual Iron solution.

YuuZoo

“We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before ICSP introduced the Virtual Iron solution,” said Anthony Cacciola, CTO for YuuZoo in Singapore. “The Virtual Iron feature set is comprehensive yet easy to use and manage. This is a solution that can deliver on our needs now and continue to meet them as we grow and expand our virtualization initiative.”

YuuZoo has built a global distribution network that enables personalized distribution of wireless value-added services and advertising to billions of mobile end users, offering wireless content owners and developers, advertisers and media companies exciting new revenue possibilities. The YuuZoo network includes access to more than 200 leading wireless carriers, portals and wireless phone manufacturers in over 50 countries across the globe, enabling a reach to more than half of the world’s 3 billion mobile subscribers. The upstream media network includes hundreds of leading wireless content developers and owners giving YuuZoo one of the world’s largest content libraries designed specifically for mobile phone use.

The company currently supports about 50 internal users in four offices and mobile applications located in four different co-location sites using 40 servers in its Windows/Linux environment. Working with ICSP Solutions, Virtual Iron and Dell, YuuZoo expects to reduce its number of servers to eight. In addition to the savings on servers, the company also expects significant reductions in its power, cooling and space requirements. Using two Dell blade server (4 Blades each) SANs and Virtual Iron, YuuZoo has also been able reduce its co-location space from four sites to two, significantly reducing its hosting costs.

Virtual Iron combines an open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities. It also includes an automated X2V conversion software solution that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities from Intel and AMD to deliver near native performance. The software offers large memory support (up to 128 GB), large SMP capabilities (up to 8 virtual CPUs) and the ability to virtualize server platforms with up to 32 physical CPUs.

[Source: VMBlog]

EMA Research on Virtualization: VMware Still Leading The Pack, Microsoft And Citrix Following Closely

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Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a US-based IT management research and consulting firm, today announced the release of its latest research report titled, “Virtualization and Management: Trends, Forecasts and Recommendations.”

EMA

“The promise of IT virtualization continues to be significant as it rightfully gains traction across servers, desktops, applications, networks, storage and more,” said research director Andi Mann. “This latest research report identifies what is really happening within the exploding virtualization marketplace, the impact it is having on IT professionals and the technology options that are available today.”

When looking across all virtualization technologies, Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that VMware still has the highest overall market penetration. However, Microsoft continues to grow its market share and — even before the formal release of Hyper-V — is within 10 percent of VMware’s lead. Citrix also poses a threat, coming in at 20 percent behind VMware, again with major product yet to be formally released.

Mann believes desktop virtualization will show the strongest growth of any virtualization technology during the next one to two years. However, the overall virtualization market will continue to be very healthy because, as this research reveals, enterprises are seeing substantial benefits in cost reduction, server consolidation, security improvement and more from virtualization technologies. The EMA study also clearly shows that virtualization is not just a test and development tool, finding that up to 75 percent of all enterprises are now using virtualization for production use cases — indicating a steady increase in outcomes and confidence since 2006.

As virtualization proliferates, it will continue to deliver many valuable outcomes. However, most companies will face multiple barriers to success. Enterprise Management Associates’ research shows that the largest challenges facing successful virtualization deployments lie with “human issues.” Key among these are the unique political challenges that virtualization creates as a result of sharing data center resources, shifting responsibility and functionality of desktops or changing the way departments access applications, storage and networks.

In addition, companies face a potential skills crisis as they find it harder to attract and retain virtualization resources. In fact, enterprises have seen a 25 percent decrease in their ability to manage virtual environments adequately with the skills they have in place.

Complexity is also a critical issue in virtualization. EMA finds that the vast majority of organizations implement virtualization on multiple platforms, using multiple technologies, from multiple vendors — adding multiple layers of complexity onto already complex physical systems. This study also shows convincingly that virtualization will not overtake existing architectures at least through 2010. “For the vast majority of enterprises, virtualization will coexist with physical deployments for the foreseeable future, so complexity will continue to be a major headache,” said Mann.

“The key to success is to approach virtualization as a strategy, not just a series of projects, and to approach it with more realistic expectations,” said Mann, “Companies need to adjust their goals, and find ways to deploy and manage virtualization in more effective ways. This report will help them to do exactly that.”

[Source: The Earth Times]

NetWrix Aims To Simplify Management of Virtual Machine Environments

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NetWrix Corporation, a provider of identity management, compliance and change management solutions for Active Directory and virtual machine environments, announced that it has broadened its scope in the IT change management solutions by offering two new products that simplify the ability to manage virtual machine environments while supporting both the VMware Infrastructure 3 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager platforms. Titled Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 and Change Reporter for Virtual Machine Manager, the new software products are designed to expand the capacity to audit, manage, monitor, analyze and report any changes made to virtual machine environments. The new products will become a part of the integrated NetWrix Change Management Suite.

NetWrix

“The decision to enter into the virtualization software market allows NetWrix to best meet the needs of its ever-expanding customer base,” said NetWrix President and CEO Michael Fimin. “We understand that change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of growing virtual machine environments and introducing the unified change auditing and change management processes will help to enhance the effectiveness of IT departments. Hundreds of customers already leverage our change management platform for Active Directory and we just applied the same proven technology to VI3 and VMM-based environments.”

Both products are available for free. In addition to the free version, NetWrix also offers a commercial version of these products that further expand the reporting capabilities. The upgraded version allows IT managers to monitor the activities of all personnel within the department and provides them with a detailed summary of all changes on a daily basis. This version records all administrative activity and e-mails daily reports to IT managers, detailing every change in virtual environment configuration, including containers, resource pools, and all other objects. Collected audit data is archived and can be stored for years. The archiving function allows organizations to analyze any policy violations, adhere to security best practices and ensure regulatory compliance.

[Source: press release]

Cisco APX, Network Virtualization The Right Way?

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Selena Frye over at TechRepublic talks about an interesting technology from Cisco called APX (Application eXtension Platform), made up of a hardware card, modified Linux software that runs on the card and a program for software developers.

Cisco

The AXP is a card that goes into your Cisco router and that card runs a hardened version of Linux, customized by Cisco. So, you aren’t running Linux on your current Cisco router CPU, RAM, and Flash or in the IOS. You are running Linux on a card that is inserted into the router.

Once you have this card and the Linux OS, you can then run third-party applications on that platform. Think about that for a minute. What if you could run a protocol analyzer like Ethereal or an IPS like SNORT “in your router?” What if you could run WAN Compression, performance monitoring, and network management software ‘in your router?” Wow — that would be amazing!

The AXP card, a standard network module (NME) or AIM card, goes in the Cisco ISR Routers (1841, 2800, and 3800 series) and has its own memory, CPU, and Flash HD (and GB Ethernet in the case of the NME). As for the specs:

AXP has its own Linux CLI, error messages, debugging, and virtualization capabilities. It can run applications in various languages — C, Python, Perl, Java. You can even read and write router configuration through APIs and receive info about the status of the router. An application running in the AXP could know if the router was taking errors on the serial interface.

Ingram Micro To Distribute VMware In Scandinavia

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Ingram Micro has signed a deal with VMware to bring its virtualization software to the Nordics.

Ingram Micro

The deal, which will complement the distributor’s existing deals with the vendor in Germany, North America and Australia, will allow reseller customers in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway the opportunity to sell VMware virtualization solutions.

“We are pleased to add VMware’s full range of virtualization solutions from the desktop to the data center to our Value Add portfolio,” said Magnus Högvall, managing director Ingram Micro Nordic Region. “By working with VMware, Ingram Micro makes virtualization accessible to customers of all sizes in the Nordics.

“At VMware we recognise the value of channel relationships and the ability to proliferate virtualization through close collaboration with the right distribution partners,” added Lewis Gee, vice president for Northern Europe at VMware.