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

Emerson Network Power Introduces New Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

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Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson, recently introduced the Avocent Virtual Advanced Console Server 6000 (ACS v6000), a new tool for secure, remote data center and out-of-band management of virtual assets.

The Avocent ACS v6000 offers a complete, centralized management solution that grants authorized users access to enterprise resources, keeping virtual assets available 24×7 while enforcing strict security measures.

All of the next-generation functionality of the popular Avocent ACS 6000 has been encapsulated in a virtual appliance to enable dependable connectivity and management of virtual IT assets, such as virtual machines running Windows EMS, UNIX, Linux and Solaris.

It also enables the end user to manage these virtual assets in the same manner as physical assets such as routers, switches, public branch exchange (PBX) telecommunications equipment (DSU/CSU) and serial power devices. The introduction of the Avocent ACS v6000 expands this capability for the first time to virtual machines, allowing IT managers to further leverage their virtualization investment while maximizing the existing offering.

Avocent Virtual ACS 6000 is available now.

Zenoss Joins The Linux Foundation

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The Linux Foundation has announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.

Zenoss products enable enterprises to assure IT service delivery and manage operations for business services, networks, and servers across physical, virtual, and cloud-based datacenters.

The company uses the open source development model to design and build its products and is joining The Linux Foundation to collaborate with Linux and open source developers and users on requirements for enterprise-level, end-to-end network monitoring.

Zenoss is working with partners such as Cisco and VMware to enable enterprise customers to manage their virtual environments and private cloud datacenters. Linux supports nearly all of the world’s cloud services, including those from Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, as well as 10gen, 3Tera, Elastra, EMC, Enomaly, Flexiscale, IBM, Mosso, Salesforce.com and more.

Citrix Reports Q2 2010 Financial Results, Shares Soar

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Citrix Systems today reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010, sending its shares soaring.

In the second quarter of fiscal 2010, Citrix achieved revenue of $458 million, compared to $393 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2009, representing 17 percent revenue growth.

Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2010 was $48 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, compared to $43 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, for the second quarter of fiscal 2009.

Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2010 includes approximately $13 million in income tax expense, or approximately $0.07 per diluted share, for the settlement in principle the company reached with the Internal Revenue Service related to transfer pricing issues as previously announced.

Non-GAAP net income in the second quarter of fiscal 2010 was $78 million, or $0.41 per diluted share, compared to $72 million, or $0.39 per diluted share, in the comparable period last year. Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2010 includes the $13 million tax expense, or approximately $0.07 per diluted share, as noted above.

Both periods exclude the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expenses, charges recorded in connection with the restructuring program that the company implemented in January 2009 and the tax effects related to those items.

In reviewing the second quarter results of 2010, compared to the second quarter of 2009:

  • Product license revenue increased 15 percent;
  • Revenue from license updates grew 13 percent;
  • Online services revenue grew 18 percent;
  • Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 35 percent;
  • Revenue increased in the America’s region by 17 percent, increased in the EMEA region by 11 percent and increased in the Pacific region by 31 percent;
  • Deferred revenue totaled $686 million, compared to $538 million on June 30, 2009;
  • GAAP operating margin was 16 percent for the quarter and non-GAAP operating margin was 26 percent for the quarter, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense and charges recorded in connection with the 2009 restructuring program;
  • Other income decreased 83 percent primarily due to losses on the re-measurement of non U.S. dollar denominated financial statement balances;
  • Cash flow from operations was $103 million, compared with $86 million in the second quarter of 2009; and
  • The company repurchased 2.2 million shares at an average price of $46.74 or $101 million.

Citrix management expects to achieve the following results during its third fiscal quarter of 2010 ending September 30, 2010:

  • Net revenue is expected to be in the range of $450 million to $460 million; and
  • GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.31 to $0.32. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.48 to $0.49, excluding $0.08 related to the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, $0.16 related to the effects of stock-based compensation expenses, certain charges recorded in conjunction with the company’s 2009 restructuring program, and $(0.06) to $(0.08) for the effect of the differential between the GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates and tax effects related to these items.
  • Interest income is expected to be $4 million.
  • Adjusted tax rate is expected to be in the range of 23% to 24%.

The above statements are based on current expectations. These statements are forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially.

Dell, HP To Certify And Resell All Three Oracle Operating Systems

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Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle’s Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers.

This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company’s operating environment.

Customers who subscribe to Oracle Premier Support will benefit from Oracle’s continuing investment in Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM and the resulting innovation in future updates.

Profitability.net Selects Extreme Networks for Virtualized Data Center and Cloud Network

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Extreme Networks today announced that colocation provider Profitability.net has chosen its virtualized 10 Gigabit data center, cloud and storage networking solutions based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy, as it rolls out its Appica.com cloud service.

Profitability.net provides data center, hosted application, and cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services for 450+ emerging to Fortune 1000 companies. Profitablity.net is launching Appica.com to provide public and private cloud servers and storage.

With Appica.com, customers can eliminate costly virtualization projects and simply add and remove servers and storage as needed. Purchasing cloud services enables customers to become profitable earlier in the business lifecycle, enabling them to choose only as much network and storage capacity as they need, rather than under-provisioning or overspending on servers to support their users.

Extreme Networks’ solution to scale and simplify the data center architectures by reducing network tiers and its network-based solutions to address Virtual Machine (VM) lifecycle management were crucial in establishing and rolling out Profitability.net’s cloud based storage and data services.

To assist the performance and uptime of Appica.com cloud services, Extreme Networks developed a customized network solution and data center migration plan based on its 4 Pillar Data Center strategy for transitioning to a highly virtualized data center while simplifying the network.

The migration strategy includes Extreme Networks scalable Ethernet switching platforms and its XNV virtualization lifecycle management solution, providing multivendor support of leading server virtualization platforms to provide visibility, control and automated management of VMs.

This next generation data center architecture accommodates Profitability.net’s evolving technology landscape, supporting integrated SAN storage, and server virtualization.

Release: OpenNebula 2.0 Beta 1

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The OpenNebula team has released the first beta version of what is to become OpenNebula 2.0 next September.

OpenNebula 2.0 Beta 1 includes a significant amount of changes and new features in many areas, bringing the most flexible, scalable and feature rich Cloud Toolkit to the Free Software community. OpenNebula 2.0 is the result of a close collaboration with our user community to address their scalability, flexibility and security requirements in large-scale production systems.

What is new in OpenNebula 2.0 Beta1

Image Repository. The Image Repository allows users to easily specify disk images from a catalog without worrying about low-level disk configuration attributes or block device mapping. Also, image access control is applied to the images registered in the repository, hence simplifying multi-user environments and image sharing. The traditional method of specifying VM disks is also fully supported.

MySQL support. OpenNebula can work now with MySQL or Sqlite DBs backends. The new MySQL support brings important performance and scalability improvements compared to the Sqlite implementation. MySQL is the recommended option for large-scale clouds.

Scalability Improvements. Several components of OpenNebula have been tuned to work with tens of thousands of VMs, including the redesign of the scheduler and adjustments to the monitoring modules.
Cluster support. Physical hosts can now be grouped in logical clusters, so after a cluster is defined it can be then used to set the placement of a VM.

Authorization & Authentication Drivers. The authorization and authentication processes in OpenNebula have been totally redesigned. Now they can be handled natively by the OpenNebula core, offering the same functionality as OpenNebula 1.4. Alternatively, the A&A processes can be handled by an external component that can be integrated with any A&A system or user maps (e.g. LDAP, Kerberos…). As an example OpenNebula 2.0 features a quota based authorization module and user authentication based on RSA keys.

Virtual Networking Improvements. OpenNebula 2.0 lets you define generic attributes associated to a a Virtual Network (e.g. gateway, dns servers…) that can then be included in the context of a VM. This will let you easily configure VMs with multiple NICs. Additionally Virtual Networks can now be defined as public, and thus shared among multiple users.

Improved EC2 support. The EC2 Query server can now be used with the EC2 ecosystem, supported third party applications include ElasticFox or EucaTools.

Java Bindings for the OpenNebula Cloud API (OCA) OpenNebula 2.0 includes JAVA bindings that wraps the XML-RPC interface methods exposed by the core.