Virtualization.com

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

Amazon Vets Launch Nimbula, Aim To Deliver Amazon EC2-like Services Behind Firewalls

by Leave a Comment

At the Structure 2010 conference on cloud computing, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, former Amazon executives who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service, announced that they are launching Nimbula. Nimbula’s business and technology focus is on blending EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with private infrastructure customization and control.

Nimbula has been operating in stealth mode since early 2009 with $5.75 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware.

Today Nimbula also unveiled details of the technology that provides the foundation for its first product, Nimbula Director, a cloud computing operating system that efficiently manages on- and off-premises IT resources on customer-controlled infrastructure.

Nimbula Director delivers utility grade computing and empowers IT innovation behind the firewall. Unlike other enterprise cloud solutions, Nimbula provides for linear scaling to thousands of nodes and automated hands-off installation and data center management. Fine-grained policy-based authorization and network security combined with metered bursting into public clouds such as Amazon Web Services offer unmatched control and visibility.

Prior to founding Nimbula, Pinkham was Vice President of Engineering at Amazon and leader of the group that planned and developed Amazon EC2. Prior to joining Amazon, Pinkham founded the first ISP in Africa, which was acquired by UUNET.

Co-founder and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon led the Amazon EC2 development effort. Prior to joining Amazon, van Biljon was a co-founder of Mosaic Software, which was acquired by S1 Corp.

Pinkham, van Biljon and Sequoia’s Botha have served as Board members since 2009. Today, Nimbula announced that VMware former CEO and co-founder, Diane Greene, also has joined the Board.

Other members of the Nimbula management team are Martin Buhr, Nimbula Vice President of Sales and Business Development, and Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula Vice President of Marketing. Most recently, Buhr spent four and a half years with Amazon Web Services where he led business development and sales for Amazon EC2, and served as Business Director for EMEA. Malekzadeh spent more than eight years at VMware in its Palo Alto headquarters and in EMEA. He was previously VP of International at Akimbi, which was acquired by VMware.

Nimbula is currently in beta with half a dozen large international customers in the financial services, technology and healthcare industries. The company plans a formal product launch and ramp to sales in the second half of 2010.

CloudSwitch Adds VMware vCloud API Support for Enterprise Customers

by Leave a Comment

CloudSwitch today announced that it has added support for the VMware vCloud API and is introducing an offering for Terremark clouds for IT professionals and developers in the enterprise who need on-demand computing and low-cost scalability.

CloudSwitch’s innovative software bridges the enterprise data center with cloud computing services, extending enterprise security and control into the cloud. With CloudSwitch, existing applications can be moved to the cloud with point-and-click simplicity and no modifications, remaining tightly integrated with enterprise data center tools and policies.

As of today, the CloudSwitch Enterprise commercial version is generally available for download. In addition, the free CloudSwitch Explorer version is available for developers and IT professionals who want to explore the cloud with no risk.

Both the Explorer and Enterprise versions are built on CloudSwitch’s patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology that secures all data and communications end-to-end and automatically maps applications into the target cloud. Once the CloudSwitch software appliance has been deployed in a virtualized environment, the customer can select Windows and Linux applications and run them in the cloud easily and securely, with no engineering efforts.

Virtual Instruments Releases VirtualWisdom 2.0

by Leave a Comment

Virtual Instruments today announced VirtualWisdom 2.0.

The new solution provides an opportunity for IT management to reduce the risk of deploying virtualized business-critical applications and increase the financial benefits of aggressively deploying virtualization technology. The ability to monitor, measure and analyze the effect of the SAN on virtualized applications increases overall application performance and reduces over-provisioning, resulting in sharply lower capital and operational costs associated with servers and storage infrastructure.

Virtual Infrastructure Optimization solutions, such as VirtualWisdom, are a critical part of any virtualization management strategy. Through comprehensive, real-time instrumentation, VirtualWisdom 2.0 adds SAN I/O intelligence to VMware environments, enabling administrators, for the first time, to balance the deployment of virtual machines based on real-time measurements of I/O performance. By identifying VMware performance bottlenecks in the SAN, VirtualWisdom 2.0 provides significantly higher virtual infrastructure utilization, allowing for delivery on the full promise of the reduced capital and operational costs of data center virtualization.

VirtualWisdom 2.0 is the successor to the NetWisdom SAN monitoring solution. Key new features and performance enhancements make VirtualWisdom 2.0 easier to use, less expensive to deploy, and faster to produce updates and reports. Targeted at enterprises looking to broadly deploy server and storage virtualization, VirtualWisdom 2.0 includes instrumentation, measurement and analysis tools — the basis for performance and resource optimization. VirtualWisdom 2.0 provides real-time and historical insights into application latency and bandwidth consumption, as well as early detection and advanced notification of device failures, congestion, and errors. It’s an early warning system that helps eliminate business-impacting outages.

Key new features of VirtualWisdom 2.0 include:

  • Customizable widget-based dashboards that enable different user types to access critical infrastructure health information easier and faster.
  • User-definable correlations enable “What-if” analysis based on real production data, providing IT managers the ability to accurately predict the effect of SAN configuration changes.
  • ProbeVM helps VMware administrators improve application performance and resolve problems quickly by monitoring I/O from the virtualized servers through the SAN to the LUN(s) within storage arrays.

To assist in the fast deployment of VirtualWisdom 2.0, Virtual Instruments also announced the VirtualWisdom Jumpstart Kit, which contains all the monitoring software and instrumentation hardware needed to improve the performance, utilization and availability of a typical business unit data center — up to 160 switch ports and 24 storage ports. The VirtualWisdom Jumpstart Kit is designed to provide all of the features and benefits of VirtualWisdom-based instrumentation, monitoring and measurement in a lower-cost, entry-level, standard deployment configuration.

VirtualWisdom 2.0 and the VirtualWisdom Jumpstart Kit are available immediately from Virtual Instruments and its authorized resellers.

Release: Parallels Server for Mac 4

by Leave a Comment

Parallels today announced the launch of Parallels Server for Mac 4, increasing the speed and reliability of virtual environments for small businesses.

Parallels Server for Mac 4 consolidates multiple operating systems resulting in the ability to retire redundant hardware and extend existing capabilities. The result of consolidation means less physical space, less power consumption and less administration skills are needed to manage the server needs of the business.

Other significant upgrades include host and guest support for Snow Leopard as well as guest support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition, it now includes Apple xSAN support, VLANs, resource usage accounting, full and incremental backups, migration and conversion of virtual machines as well as express installations for Windows and Linux guests.

All of the advanced automation and management features of Parallels Virtual Automation are now available to the Parallels Server for Mac 4 installations including user self service, anytime/anywhere management and click to migrate capabilities.

Commercial pricing starts at $1,999 USD.

However, the upgrade is included at no additional cost to Parallels Server for Mac 3 customers on maintenance. Parallels Server for Mac 3 customers without maintenance will be offered an upgrade SKU at a special time limited offer. Upgrades are available now.

Parallels Server for Mac 4 will be available on July 2, 2010 from selected Apple stores, software resellers, from the Parallels website and its  US sales team.

Red Hat Reports First Quarter Results, Revenue Comes In At $209 Million

by Leave a Comment

Red Hat today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 first quarter ended May 31, 2010.

Total revenue for the quarter was $209.1 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $179.1 million, up 20% year-over-year.

GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $34.2 million, or a 16.4% operating margin. After adjusting for stock compensation and amortization expenses as detailed in the tables below, non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter was $52.0 million, up 28% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 24.8%, up 140 basis points from the year ago quarter.

Net income for the quarter was $24.1 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, compared with $18.5 million, or $0.10 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $35.6 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, after adjusting for stock compensation and amortization expenses as detailed in the tables below, as compared to $28.7 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter.

Operating cash flow totaled $60.6 million, as compared to $61.2 million in the year ago quarter. At quarter end, the company’s total deferred revenue balance was $625.6 million, an increase of 10% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of May 31, 2010 was $967.8 million.