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Moderro Debuts Xpack Internet Computer

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Moderro Technologies today announced the Xpack Internet Computer – a turnkey web-centric cloud computer.

The Xpack Internet Computer is an integrated (hardware, operating system and web management) solution for the cloud desktop. It features a clean and friendly user interface and operating system that was written by Moderro specifically for interacting with web-based applications.

This functionality, combined with simplicity, security, small footprint, energy efficiency, and backward compatibility, make the Moderro Xpack a perfect choice for “cloud-only” office or venue.

The Xpack desktop hardware includes a USB keyboard and mouse and a standard VESA mount option, which allows the hardware enclosure to be mounted to the back of the LCD display. Dual VGA/DVI output options coupled with dual monitor auto-detection, allows Xpack users to increase in productivity by using one display for monitoring, another for working.

Xpack’s energy consumption is a fraction of that of a regular computer with its advanced power-saving technology and software-driven power-management functions. The Xpack is also a solid state computer with no moving parts to ensure reliability especially when used as a public terminal or kiosk solution.

By using web applications, XPack users keep their data on Moderro’s integrated cloud storage, or on a personal USB storage device, which allows Moderro to get rid of local storage and make the system proof from viruses and other malware.

Enterprises are assured their migration to cloud computing will be seamless because the Moderro Xpack is compatible with popular desktop virtualization technologies such as ones from VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix. This allows IT departments preserve their investment by making the Xpack compatible with existing investment while transitioning to all-cloud computing.

Communications capabilities include a WiFi Antenna and 100/1000 Ethernet port.

Moderro is targeting the Xpack Internet Computer for use in public terminals, kiosks and libraries, education and training facilities, as well as private and government offices ready to migrate to cloud computing. Xpack is available direct from Moderro. The Xpack has a starting price of $395.

CA Announces Integrated Enterprise IT Management Solutions

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CA today announced an integrated suite of Enterprise IT Management (EITM) solutions designed to maximize the business value of virtualization, helping enterprise customers and cloud computing providers improve IT agility and service quality, increase efficiency, and mitigate IT and business risk. The suite leverages one of the industry’s broadest set of IT management, governance and security solutions, spanning virtualized distributed and mainframe computing, storage, network and desktop infrastructures.

CA EITM solutions address this need for virtualization management, and deliver:

Improved Agility

— Provision and monitor resources in the cloud: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps consumers and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale, and manage dynamic computing resources on demand. The solution enables enterprises, Infrastructure Utility providers, business process outsourcers, and cloud computing providers to seamlessly provision and monitor cloud computing resources to allow for overflow capacity during peak demands, rapid policy-based response to business demands, more dynamic failover, and highly efficient infrastructure.
— Accelerate and automate virtualized data center provisioning: CA Data Center Automation Manager empowers IT organizations to integrate and automate virtual and physical server provisioning cycles. By automatically allocating resources in real time based on business policies, customers can accelerate the provisioning of applications into production and rapidly provision additional capacity in response to dynamic business demands.
— Employ change management for dynamic virtualized environments: CA Service Desk Manager’s change management function helps to govern approval of data center automation policies, guided by CA CMDB’s advanced change impact analysis, visibility to complex infrastructure dependencies and record of approved configurations.As automated policies are executed by CA Data Center Automation Manager, CA CMDB and its automated application discovery function can log and track automated changes, allowing change managers to analyze how automated policies are complying with authorized configurations.
— Dynamically extend workload automation to virtualized environments: The integration of CA Workload Automation and CA Data Center Automation Manager provides the unique ability to help to identify and provision computing capacity to accommodate workloads onto virtualized environments. Customers can dynamically implement systems and processes to handle planned and unplanned workload and transaction bursts, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not breached.

Improved Service Quality

— Assure application performance and availability: CA Wily Application Performance Management helps monitor application performance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and when integrated with CA Data Center Automation Manager, can trigger the provisioning of additional virtualized resource pools to avoid or resolve performance problems.
— Discover, track, and monitor the performance of virtual server resources: CA Advanced Systems Management helps IT organizations to discover, track and monitor virtual resources across a breadth of virtual and physical platforms. CA IT Client Manager can perform hardware and software inventory of virtual systems as well as update them with new software and critical security patches.
— Avoid human configuration errors: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps avoid application degradations and outages by maintaining configuration consistency in virtual environments. Using autonomic policies requiring no human intervention, the solution tracks and remediates configuration drift from development through production.
— Improve high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery: CA XOsoft High Availability offers fast and reliable failover and failback capabilities for virtualized servers and applications. CA ARCserve Backup delivers reliable, enterprise-class data protection across multiple hardware and software platforms, including virtual machines. CA can offer replication and high-availability assurance for all resources.
— Assure virtual network availability: CA is architecting its premier network management solutions, CA eHealth Network Performance Manager and CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager, to discover, monitor and deliver fault and performance management for virtualized network resources, leveraging years of customer success with physical network management. This will provide the agility to manage virtual and physical networks from a single pane of glass, help to ensure the quality of network service, help to improve management efficiency, and mitigate the risk of business disruption from network outages.

Increased Efficiency

— Dramatically streamline processes and reduce costs: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to reduce process and organizational complexity and address labor and application costs by implementing automated virtualization-based data center processes. CA is working on integrating CA Data Center Automation Manager with CA Service Catalog. This will help to reduce component complexity through standard service, application and computing resource catalogs and bills of materials. CA IT Asset Manager empowers organizations to streamline the request, approval and assignment of available virtual images.
— Increase server and VM utilization, optimize energy management, and reduce facilities costs: CA NSM identifies and reports on server utilization across the data center, and identifies and prioritizes server candidates for virtualization. CA Advanced Systems Management can dynamically allocate server resources to virtual guests based on their requirements, thereby improving virtual machines to host utilization. CA Data Center Automation Manager can optimize the number of servers required and the energy they consume.
— Optimize asset management, chargeback and virtualization planning: CA IT Asset Manager and CA Service Accounting ease the complex task of tracking cost, licenses and assets across virtualized resources. The solutions also simplify the process of charging lines of business and other stakeholders for their use of shared and dedicated virtualized resources. CA IT Asset Manger, in conjunction with CA Clarity PPM, provides IT leaders with enhanced ability to manage costs, project workflows, and staff for virtualization deployments, aligning the investment to defined and measurable business outcomes. CA Advanced Systems Management assists customers in avoiding VM sprawl and its accompanying cost and complexity while managing demand for additional resources.
— Consolidate the management of security and access policies: CA Access Control’s management console helps an administrator to create, manage and track hundreds of policies across multiple virtual and physical server platforms. This enables a consistent level of protection and reduces the time and resources required to secure these dynamic IT resources.
— Extend mainframe virtualization: CA VM Manager Management Suite for Mainframe Linux helps IT organizations to manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux for System z by managing guest systems and enabling provisioning. This integrated suite of products includes solutions for automated operations, service level management, backup and recovery, storage management and security management. By enabling organizations to maximize machine, personnel, tape and DASD resources, it helps organizations control costs, maintain high service levels and provide efficient system performance. Planned integration with CA Data Center Automation Manager to help customers to gain end-to-end provisioning visibility and management.

Mitigated IT and Business Risks

— Plan data center virtualization efforts: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to discover applications across data centers and enable customers to have critical IT application and infrastructure visibility. Armed with a clear picture of data center configurations between applications, servers, storage and other infrastructure, customers can profile applications based on importance and I/O characteristics. With the addition of CA CMDB’s mapping of applications to business services, they can also focus virtualization efforts on less-critical, lower-risk services and computing resources.
— Secure virtualization environments: CA Access Control manages several of the security risks common to virtualization by protecting critical resources through Separation of Duties (SoD) for privileged or shared accounts. The solution also provides consistent access control policies, resource protection, and entitlement reporting across virtualization hosts and the guest operating systems.
— Maintain compliance: Dynamic virtualization can change computing and information architectures, disrupt tracking and reporting, and also undermine compliance governance based on static, physical environments. CA’s virtualization management offerings, with their ability to track and report on virtualized resources, can help customers monitor their compliance, despite the changes inherent in virtualized environments. CA Access Control and CA Audit provide a comprehensive set of server resource protection reports that can reduce the time, cost and complexity of the compliance process in enterprise environments.

Hyperic Releases HQ 4.0, Hires Former Salesforce Exec

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Hyperic today announced HQ 4.0, the next evolution of its systems monitoring and management application. The new release addresses the growing needs of businesses embracing Amazon cloud services to create affordable and scalable IT deployment strategies.

With today’s release, Hyperic HQ is the first software that enables the modern enterprise to monitor its Amazon Web Services securely alongside internal infrastructure. It is also the first enterprise-class monitoring and management software offered for deployment and payment directly though Amazon Web Services.

Datacenters have a fixed capacity for handling application traffic at any given time and distribute resources to match average peak capacity. Businesses deploying in Amazon’s cloud now have access to unlimited number of resources, and pay only for the services they need at any given time. To remain cost-effective, operations teams need to frequently tune web and application server capacity to match fluctuations in demand.

Hyperic HQ 4.0 addresses this need for a new generation of monitoring and management tool that will help enterprises adopt cloud computing strategies with confidence, by better equipping operations teams to perform repetitive management tasks more efficiently. Traditionally, installing a new server and deploying it into production was a lengthy process that took place over days or weeks. Now, with cloud providers like Amazon offering the ability to rapidly deploy servers in minutes and pay by the hour, companies need a way to ensure consistent monitoring oversight of their web operations that is just as fast and flexible.

In developing the new release, Hyperic has drawn upon its extensive experience in providing the automation and visibility needed to maintain application performance in datacenters using virtualization software. Hyperic HQ currently manages over 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments. Also referred to as “private clouds,” these environments consist of both physical and virtual servers, and typically support high rates of change as virtual servers are easily added, subtracted or moved to improve server utilization and maintain service levels.

The new Hyperic HQ 4.0 release starts by streamlining the process of adding new software resources into management. After auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and services checks to be immediately applied. Coupled with global alert templates for resource types, the entire system of monitoring and rules for warning of performance problems can be incorporated in under a minute.

In addition, the release also addresses additional areas of concern for virtualized and cloud-based deployment including security, application management and capacity planning. A new server communication protocol allows agents monitoring external resources to always initiate communication with the HQ Server in order to meet to security protocols and operate across firewalls. Despite the uni-directional communication, the agent still maintains a full range of capabilities including the ability to update and run diagnostics remotely, and issue corrective control actions such as a service restart or running garbage collection to free memory.

Additionally, a new capacity planning function automatically analyzes historical performance and projects the future resource trends of any given management metric. This function allows users to quickly assess and predict future trends, and proactively manage capacity needs to anticipate demand or conserve costs.

Also part of the 4.0 release, Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 will be available as a fully configured system on Amazon’s Web Services. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) preconfigured for Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is expected to be available later this month. The new distribution will be available directly on Amazon’s DevPay service for a low initiation fee and a monthly charge based on the amount of management data being collected to the HQ Server. A familiar arrangement to businesses looking to embrace the cloud, there will be no contract term and users will simply pay for how much value they are deriving from the Hyperic HQ Enterprise application.

Hyperic also announced the appointment of Matthew Stodolnic to the newly created company position of vice president of marketing. Stodolnic, who joins the Hyperic executive team after seven years with Salesforce.com, will be responsible for the company’s overall marketing strategy and further expansion into cloud computing.

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix (VMworld 2008) part 1/2

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Below is the first part of our exclusive video interview recorded at VMworld2008 in Las Vegas, where Citrix XenSource CTO Simon Crosby tells us where he sees Virtualization going in general and shares his view on the future of security, networking and I/O virtualization in particular.

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Feel free to check on the I/O Virtualization vendors we covered in the past, such as 3Leaf, Neterion, NextIO, VertenSys with Neterion or Xsigo.

A full transcript of the interview is below. you might want to check on our previous chat with Simon at VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes to see if what he claims is consistent on both sides of the atlantic.

(00:11) Simon Crosby, you’re the CTO, Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.  What are the next challenges you see coming up in Virtualization?

Simon Crosby: So Virtualization today is server only, right?  So in fact the question to me is “where does Virtualization go generally”?  The technology works superbly for clients.  It applies in terms of virtualizing the client device and it works great in PDAs and various other mobile internet devices and so on.  So Virtualization is going down that path.  Xen already runs on all machines of that category and does so with great performance.  So now we can expose real devices, models, straight up to Windows and so on and we can get terrific performance.  So Virtualization technology will go much more broadly into the execution environments.  Virtualization adoption by enterprise It’s a big, big change, right?  Because everything changes.  So just to get beyond 10% or 12 or whatever adoption percentage we are at right now, the whole of the enterprise IT process has to be rethought.

(01:13) Where do you see the real challenges when it comes to security and virtualization and how can you organize those?

Today, I think you know we do a pretty good job of pulling in the storage and the compute side of it, that is we dynamically drive storage for virtualization.  Networking is still way out there.  I mean because the security folks want to know exactly where the bump in the wire is. Arguably as you move the virtual machines around in the data center because of those network security policies you got to follow them.  That doesn’t happen yet.  So, all of that has  to change but as you start to do this, people who got a very rational concern for knowing where things are, that they are secured, that they die when they should and all that sort of stuff, right?  And so, the general complexity that virtual machines bring is that our appetite for computers have not gone down.  There are more VMs than there are physical servers.  They live some place you don’t generally know where.  At any point in time, you need to find the darn thing.  Check if it’s secured.  Check if it’s updated.  Manage it through its life cycle and then throw it away securely.  So it actually complicates things.  So the great thing by Virtualization is we now get as a bunch of IT vendors, to go and redo it all and do it right and do it better and that’s the opportunity.

(02:34) Now Simon, one of the major announcements here at VMworld was that, VMware together with Cisco, they’ve launched VN-link which is a new standard for networks to become virtual machine aware.  What’s your point of view on that, on this merging of virtual network solutions and standards in that field?

The fundamental driver here is Moore’s law., So we get more and more and more VMs per server.  That means that the switch technology that we use in the virtualized platform in general, has to become more and more like a network based switch.
So that’s a good observation.  Therefore, all of the separation and other policies that you want to have in a network have got to follow your VMs, right?  So there is an interesting question of what you do there?  Now the VMware virtual switch (indeed there is one in XenServer too) are based on the bridge code that came out of Linux. We modified  so it can support VLANs and everything else, but that’s where it came from.  So there’s a very rational question as to how this evolves over the time?  Now, the technology that’s coming down the wire is essentially IOV. If you do SRIOV..

03:35 Could you quickly explain what IOV and SRIOV stand for?
SRIOV stands for single root I/O virtualization.  It’s the I/O Virtualization standard coming out of the PCI SIG and with that, essentially you introduce the ability for a NIC-card to have a full layer 2 switch on it.  So what’s going to happen is that it’ll all move to hardware. And those layer 2 switches will look like existing real physical switches in your Ethernet, okay?  And so, in general, you know we have to have the same ability to control those and manage them as we do with our physical network infrastructure today.

Release: Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

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Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac, which enables users to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems side-by-side with Mac OS X. The new version improves OS integration, performs up to 50% faster and incorporates a range of security, backup and power saving features to give Mac users a truly easy, fast and powerful desktop computing solution.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac introduces support for DirectX 9, DirectX Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL 2.0, providing fast video performance, while the Adaptive Hypervisor dynamically allocates resources to meet user needs. The responsiveness to all applications is further enhanced as the virtualization engine has been optimized to consume 15-30% less resources than previous versions.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac addresses two other primary user concerns: security and backup. The software offers users peace of mind through Parallels Internet Security powered by Kaspersky for anti-virus, firewall, scanner, recovery, filtering and identity protection as well as Acronis True Image Home backup and restore and Acronis Disk Director Suite. These three additions to Parallels Desktop represent $175 in extra value along with a more complete user experience.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is available in English and localized versions will soon be available in Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Polish and Russian.

The standard retail price (SRP) of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is $79.99. New users can test a free, fully-functional copy for 15 days. Current Parallels Desktop users can upgrade their existing software for only $39.99 – a 50% off promotional price available until November 30, 2008. Users that purchased version 3.0 on or after September 1, 2008, qualify for a free upgrade to version 4.0.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is available at Amazon.com, Apple Store, Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics, MicroCenter, Office Depot, Staples and hundreds of other retailers nationwide.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

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As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.