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Canonical Launches Virtual Appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C Software On The Ubuntu Cloud

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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has launched a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations.

Canonical also announced that IBM has completed validation of the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.

This announcement is the latest in the growing ecosystem for Ubuntu 10.04, which launched in April with declarations of support from more than 80 organisations.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular guest infrastructure layers on cloud services like Rackspace and Amazon EC2. Increasingly, it is also being deployed as the host cloud infrastructure layer (as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud) by private organisations and ISPs. IBM DB2 Express-C software will be available however Ubuntu is deployed on a cloud.

IBM DB2 Express-C is a no-charge community edition of DB2 software. It is ideal for small businesses and multi-branch companies, as well as developers and business partners who serve these clients. DB2 Express-C can be setup quickly, is easy-to-use, and includes self-managing capabilities. It also embodies all of the core features of more scalable DB2 editions, including pureXML technology for powering Web 2.0 and SOA-based solutions.

Acronis Poaches Dana Prestigiacomo From CA, Appoints Her VP of Marketing

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Acronis, a provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, has hired Dana Prestigiacomo as Vice President of Marketing.

Prestigiacomo joins Acronis from CA Technologies, where she most recently served as Senior Vice President of Marketing.

In this post, she oversaw a wide range of programs for their direct and channel business from market segmentation and analysis to campaigns focused on awareness, thought leadership, and demand generation.

Formerly Prestigiacomo served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field and Channel Marketing, responsible for all global demand generation activities, marketing metrics and a wide range of programs.

Prior to joining CA Technologies in 2005, she held the position of Senior Vice President of Marketing at The Thomson Corporation, one of the world’s largest information companies which later merged with Reuters to become Thomas Reuters. In addition, Prestigiacomo served in a variety of senior brand and marketing positions within IBM.

Prestigiacomo earned a bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of California, Davis.

Vyatta Teams Up With Zycko

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Vyatta, provider of open networking and network virtualization solutions, is partnering with value-added distributor Zycko to provide a scalable, flexible and affordable network and routing software alternative to the existing proprietary routing and security solutions in the EMEA market.

Vyatta provides a software-based, open-source, network operating system with a complete enterprise-class routing and security feature set, capable of scaling from DSL to 20Gbps performance at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions.

As a software solution, Vyatta delivers a single, portable network operating system that is optimized to connect and secure physical networks, virtual servers and applications and cloud computing environments.

As well as supplying Vyatta software, Zycko will also offer Vyatta alongside Riverbed, using the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) that is powered by VMware. Vyatta, a member of the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA), delivers a certified RSP Ready software package.

Vyatta is already well established in North America and boasts a range of government departments, universities, SaaS providers, VoIP suppliers and Fortune 500 companies among its customers. Recently, Vyatta was named to CRN‘s 2010 Emerging Vendors list for the networking sector and ranked no. 15 in The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50.

Zycko is a value-add distributor of best-in-class convergent IT infrastructure solutions through a channel of resellers, systems integrators and service providers.

Zycko is privately held and has been profitable since inception in 2000, when the company’s original charter was to market data networking accessories to resellers as a wholesale distributor. Zycko now employs over 275 staff, serving over 2000 resellers around the world from twelve offices on four continents. The company enjoys an annual turnover of $198m.

Zycko’s strategic partner base includes world-class companies such as, Aastra, Asigra, Eaton, ExaGrid, FalconStor, Force10, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei Symantec, Intransa, Isilon, LifeSize, PowerDsine, ProLabs, Riverbed, SmartOptics, Spectra Logic, Talari Networks, USystems, Virtensys and Xsigo.

Release: Zenoss Core 3.0

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Zenoss, the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the general availability of Zenoss Core 3.0 under the GNU General Public License (V2).

Fueled by the 85,000-member Zenoss community, the newest release features an updated user interface to improve usability giving users a complete view of all IT infrastructure — physical, virtual and cloud computing.

Beyond its new functional capabilities, Zenoss Core has been integrated with multiple open source IT automation projects, providing a framework for improved functionality and enabling better prevention of service failures.

Since the last Zenoss Core release in November 2009, the community has added more than 100 new and updated management extensions to the project (called ZenPacks).

What’s New in Zenoss Core 3.0

  • Simplified Interface. Based on feedback from thousands of users, Zenoss Core 3.0 includes an easy to navigate interface that allows for a better experience using and configuring Zenoss. Users now can more easily filter network monitoring data and organize their dashboards through a more efficient layout to help surface critical information for managing their physical and virtual infrastructure.

  • Virtualization Monitoring Framework. The Zenoss Community has developed extensions to expand monitoring for numerous virtualization technologies: VMware ESX, VMware ESXi,Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, and libvirt.

  • Deep monitoring for Amazon Web Services (EC2). Zenoss Core can be extended to collect information for these objects monitored through Amazon’s CloudWatch APIs. As a result of the Zenoss in the Clouds community initiative, Zenoss Core can also be extended to monitor Google App Engine, Redis NoSQL databases, Ganglia-managed distributed computing systems and events from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), which is frequently used in enterprise business and cloud environments.

  • Integration with Configuration Management and Automation Tools. The Zenoss Community has developed integration with popular open source management tools Puppet andCfengine to enable interoperability between tools and provide automated disaster recovery and prevention.

  • Highlights of new community ZenPacks compatible with Zenoss Core 3.0 include:

    • Event Histograms aggregate network errors and provide graphs to visually display where faults and failures are in the network, when alerts are peaking, and what type of errors are being generated.

    • HP EVA Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring and a graphical representation of storage, updating graphics based on events.

    • MySQL SSH Monitor provides identical monitoring to the Zenoss Core MySQL Monitorwithout requiring remote access.

    • Opengear wrote ZenPacks, extending Zenoss open source management tools to monitor performance of its advanced console server solutions and the target equipment attached.

    • Additional highlights: Oracle Database, Memcached, Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), Collector Tool, and Nginx.

The Zenoss 3.0 release can be downloaded from the Zenoss Community website at:http://community.zenoss.org/community/download.

OpenStack – Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform

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Rackspace has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

Rackspace, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology.

It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

PHD Virtual Backup 4.0-4 Lands, Brings vSphere 4.1 Support

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PHD Virtual has released version of 4.0-4 of PHD Virtual Backup (formerly esXpress – download trial here).  The update can be applied by running the ‘Check for Updates’ process.

This release adds support for VMware’s latest release, vSphere 4.1.

New features found in version 4.0-4:

  • Supports the latest VMware release: vSphere 4.1
  • Simplified configuration with fewer steps
  • Improved ease of use
  • Login panel now uses the VI Client registry to display available servers.
  • When deploying a DeDupe appliance with an attached VMDK for backup storage, a warning is now displayed if creating the disk will cause the volume to drop below 15% free space.
  • VBA location will now display file size limits based on the block size of the selected storage location.
  • The daily backup report now contains a simplified HTML view with links to the full report.
  • Various bug fixes.