Virtualization.com – Page 358 – News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

A Look At Cloudo, Another Attempt To Popularize The WebOS

February 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Recently, a new web-based operating systems (WebOS) launched its private beta suite in another attempt to bring the desktop to the browser. Its name is Cloudo, it was made in Sweden and it was previously a part of Xindesk which has now separated itself into two entities, the other being an open widget platform dubbed WidgetPlus.

There are a number of web-based operating systems already on the market, e.g. G.ho.st, Jooce, YouOS, eyeOS and DesktopTwo to name but a few, and Cloudo doesn’t bring a lot of new things to the table yet: it features file hosting, virtual desktop widgets, applications, e-mail and contact management and eventually a full suite of programs you’d expect from a regular desktop OS. You can sign up for the beta here.

Virtualization may be big in the business market, but is a web-based OS really something consumers are waiting for?

[Sources: Web 2.0 weblog and TechCrunch (trackback)]

Gartner: Server Market Doing Fine Until Further Notice

February 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A new report from Gartner shows the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %. The world’s server vendors combined to ship 2.4 million boxes during the fourth quarter and brought in $ 15.5 billion for their efforts. In all of 2007, shipments rose 7 %, while revenue jumped 4 %. For the entire year, vendors moved more than 8.8 million units and generated $ 54.8 billion in revenue, according to Gartner.

The rise of virtualization and the general economic slowdown, combined with trimmed budgets at the financial services companies, has left a lot of analysists proclaiming a big slowdown and even downfall in hardware sales. But so far, the sky seems blue.

Out of the top vendors, Hewlett-Packard enjoyed the strongest fourth quarter in terms of shipments. It grew 12 % year-over-year, while Dell grew at 9 %, IBM grew at 7 % and Sun declined by 6 %. Fujitsu-Siemens also enjoyed a super quarter with 18 % growth.

Vendor	Q4 Shipments	Gain/Loss
1) HP	702,100	12%
2) Dell	499,687	8.8%
3)IBM	372,701	7.4%
4)Sun	84,778	-6.3%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens	75,882	17.9%

Almost all of the vendors saw their revenue rise during the fourth quarter. IBM stood out as the lone laggard, despite it talking an awful lot lately about how strong its server business is.

Vendor	Revenue	Gain/Loss
1) IBM	$5.3bn	-0.8%
2)HP	$4.4bn	7.6%
3)Dell	$1.6bn	4.1%
4)Sun	$1.49bn	1.0%
5)Fujitsu/Siemens	$616k	2.1%

For the full year, HP stood out with 17 % growth in shipments, leading the herd. Sun was the biggest loser, dropping 8.3 %. In revenue, Dell was the main gainer, showing sales growth of 13.2 %. HP notched 9 % growth as well, while the rest of the vendors were in the low single digits.

Everyone moved a ton of x86 boxes and benefited from double-digit growth in terms of shipments. HP, Fujistu-Siemens and Sun had double-digit revenue growth as well, while Dell came in at 4 % and IBM hit 7 % growth.”Blade servers continue to be a high-growth segment with a revenue increase of 44.5 % and a shipment increase of 19.9 % for the year,” Gartner said. “HP was the 2007 leader with blades at a 41.7 % shipment share, with IBM being in second place at 30.9 %. These two vendors continued to dominate this form factor and totaled almost 78 % of the worldwide blade revenue share for 2007.”

[Source and tables: The Register]

Parallels And AXIGEN Launch Strategic Partnership

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AXIGEN, a Romanian mail server vendor, and Parallels (former SWSoft), virtualization and automation software provider, yesterday announced the launch of a strategic technological partnership in which the companies will offer an integrated AXIGEN Mail Server and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution specifically for service providers offering virtualized hosting environments.

From the official press release:

The new AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers integration presents a high-end, flexible solution that enables Service Providers the ability to offer customized mail server solutions for customers via an easily deployable, low-maintenance SaaS model. Unlike traditional, generic hosting solutions, in which software must be installed and configured manually, the AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution allows Service Providers to offer customers a wide variety of pre-made Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, called templates, that are populated with optimized configurations of the AXIGEN mail server. Customers can choose the template that is right for their business, and have the solution deployed to them with only a few clicks.

“Parallels Virtuozzo Containers’ superior density and manageability, coupled with its ability to rapidly deploy software via pre-configured templates, make it an ideal choice for ISVs to deploy their software via a SaaS model,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels.”The partnership with AXIGEN is an excellent example of a forward-thinking application vendor harnessing the power of SaaS and of Parallels’ continued momentum with Service Providers and SaaS.”

“Given that the AXIGEN Mail server is a service provider oriented solution, we are confident the integrated AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution will better address the emerging requirements of this highly competitive environment,” said Oana Bornaz, CEO of AXIGEN. “Moreover, both Parallels and AXIGEN now benefit from an expanded customer base, a fact mutually beneficial to the development of our companies.”

IBM Takes Virtual Servers Into Virtual Worlds

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM has long been fascinated with the potential of 3-D virtual worlds and has now taken the next step and created actual 3-D virtual worlds that enterprise companies can use to manage their existing data centers or design new ones, as announced today by the company.

IBM’s new 3-D Data Center software can create a 3-D replica of servers, racks, networking, power and cooling equipment that communicates with real-world equipment to provide managers with a centralized view of IT operations. The environment is based on the OpenSimulator project and IBM middleware known as the Holographic Enterprise Interface (HEI), which can communicate with building automation systems to replicate physical data center operations in the virtual world.

Is this another novelty experiment in virtual worlds by corporate America, or has IBM found a killer business application for 3D gaming technology? IBM notes that the 3-D Data Center (PDF) can recreate two or more remote data centers, but is a multi-user virtual world, complete with in-world 3D messaging.

“Viewing information about your data center in 2-D text – even in real time – only tells a data center manager part of the story, because our brains are wired for sight and sound,” said IBM Researcher Michael Osias, who architected the 3-D data center service. “By actually seeing the operations of your data center in 3-D, even down to flames showing hotspots and visualizations of the utilization of servers allows for a clearer understanding of the enterprise resources, better informed decision-making and a higher level of interaction and collaboration.”

IBM has given data center managers the ability to replicate their data center assets in an environment much like World of Warcraft, and then work together to manage the environment – kind of like conducting a raid on a heating and cooling challenge. The technology has arrived. Do data center managers want this?

IBM is ready to find out (although it’s not announcing pricing). It will be interesting to track the progress of the 3-D Virtual Data Center and see if new client announcements follow.

[Source: DatacenterKnowledge]

CohesiveFT Opens Up Registrations For Its Elastic Server On-Demand Community Edition

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Cohesive Flexible Technologies today announced open registration for its Elastic Server On-Demand Community Edition which had been in private beta since July 2007. The free Community Edition has key new capabilities including the ability for users to upload their own software packages and applications for use in assembling, deploying and managing virtual application stacks.

“ESOD Community Edition is a free Internet platform for independent developers and individual enterprise developers to take advantage of virtualization and cloud computing utilities like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)”, said Patrick Kerpan, CTO at CohesiveFT. “It allows them to take their application stack ‘recipes’, capture them, and reproduce them as virtual servers automatically with both speed and quality”, he added.

Craig Heimark, CohesiveFT’s CEO, added: “ESOD is the first service to offer developers and operations complete control of their server assembly independent of which virtualization or cloud technology they require. The ability to allow the independent developer community to jump into cloud-computing in this way is an important dimension of our overall service offerings.”

CohesiveFT’s platform allows customers to build and manage applications for virtualized infrastructure. Using a “built to order” process, customers assemble a downloadable, cloud-deployable, application container in the virtualization format of their choice.

[Source: Virtual Strategy Magazine]

Incipient Raises $ 15.6 Million Venture Capital Funding In Series E

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Incipient, a provider of enterprise-class storage virtualization and automated data migration software solutions, announced today that it has closed a $15.6 million Series E round of funding from existing investors including Globespan Capital Partners, GrandBanks Capital, HLM Venture Partners, Greylock, QuestMark Partners, Sigma Partners, and Wasatch Advisors, as well as a new investor.

Incipient says it will use this new funding to expand global sales and marketing initiatives for its enterprise-class award winning storage virtualization and automated data migration software solutions now being used by leading financial services organizations to automate and virtualize their data center operations.

“We are pleased with the continued steadfast support and confidence of this storage-savvy investor group participating in this latest round of funding,” said Ric Calvillo, CEO and co-founder of Incipient. “Over the last year we have seen a dramatic increase in customer traction and interest in both our storage virtualization and automated data migration solutions within the financial services market segment. We see this interest accelerating globally over the upcoming year as we uniquely address the desire by large financial services accounts to automate and virtualize data center operations to manage complexities associated with storage growth and business service requirements.”

“The need to automate and virtualize data center operations is a top priority for global financial services entities and Incipient is uniquely well-positioned to capitalize on this rapidly evolving market opportunity,” said Bill Helman, general partner, Greylock. “We look forward to working with and continuing to support Incipient as they execute on the major market opportunity they are now prepared to exploit with their enterprise-class solutions.”

[Source: VMBlog]