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HEI Systems & Solutions Debuts Integrated Storage and Virtualization Solutions

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HEI Systems & Solutions announced the release of two new products last week targeted at small to mid-sized businesses looking to leverage advanced virtualization solutions at an affordable price. HEI’s Z2 Systems line includes the R3000 Storage Server and the R3000x Integrated Storage and Virtualization Server.The R3000 is a one rack unit (1U) storage server with 3 terabytes of redundant enterprise class storage.Included with the Storage Server is HEI developed software integrated with Citrix XenServer™ to provide configurable snap-shotting, on-disk cloning and roll-back of individual virtual machines, in addition to other virtual machine management and automation capabilities. By providing an orchestration layer between the storage and the virtualization components, the Z2 solution enables organizations of all sizes to implement enterprise level system management and disaster recovery solutions without significant capital investment and ongoing operational costs. The R3000 is capable of expanding up to 96 terabytes using a mixture of Enterprise SATA or SAS hard drives, and is available with redundant, energy efficient power supplies.

The R3000x system is built upon the Supermicro 1U Twin “twin server” architecture that includes a similar storage platform as in the R3000 and an additional dedicated server in the same 1U chassis, providing a platform for virtualization with dual quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs and 16GB of RAM (up to 48GB available). The unique architecture includes a dedicated 10 Gigabit/s Ethernet storage network between the two nodes, providing high-speed and secure data access. 

In general, the Z2 Systems are priced at about 10-25 percent of the cost compared to larger enterprise class storage platforms, but provide the same advanced features required to effectively host a reliable and supportable virtualization infrastructure. The R3000 has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $5,650 for the basic storage server, and the R3000x is priced at $6,449 with the integrated virtualization platform.

Release: Lanamark Suite 2009

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Lanamark today announced general availability of Lanamark Suite 2009. The new version includes support for monitoring Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX, supplements server information with power consumption, form factor, age and warranty metrics, and simplifies capacity planning with significant user experience and reporting automation enhancements.

Lanamark Suite 2009 now includes monitoring of Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX free of charge for all assessments commencing prior to March 31, 2009. Standard licensing per desktop or server workload per assessment still applies.

Novell Offers Solution For Workload Management In The “Mixed IT Data Center”

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Novell today announced significant enhancements to its PlateSpin Workload Management solution. The new PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Orchestrate enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. Through these new enhancements, PlateSpin Workload Management is the only solution on the market today to support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As data centers increasingly deploy diverse hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies in heterogeneous environments, the artificial boundaries between physical and virtual machines are being erased by portable workloads – the combination of an operating system, application and data software independent from the underlying physical or virtual platform. PlateSpin Workload Management enables data center administrators to optimize the distribution of workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines. As a result, customers can transform their IT environment into a more efficient and resilient next-generation data center.

PlateSpin Workload Management has added key functionality that makes PlateSpin a critical component of the day-to-day operation of the next-generation data center. PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

Roger Baskerville Leaves Citrix / XenSource

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Roger Baskerville has left Citrix, where he started out as the Sales Director of Xensource EMEA , after the Citrix merger to become Regional Director Northern Europe Server Virtualization .

During his years at Xensource Roger was one of the first commercial pushers of Xen and later XenEnterprise.

Roger has now joined Vizioncore as Vice President for EMEA and he will be responsible for EMEA operations. He leads the sales, marketing and systems engineering teams based across the region. Baskerville has held a variety of senior channel focused EMEA sales leadership positions with both mature high tech organizations as well as start-up operations. Previous companies include LightPointe, Palm, Compaq and NCR. A seasoned industry speaker who is both technically astute and sales focussed, Baskerville brings with him a wealth of experience in virtualization and international sales.

Earlier this year Quest fully acquired VizionCore as part of their journey into virtualization, after earlier
already owning a smaller part of the company. VizionCore then was described as the leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management.

Today their website reads
“VizionCore Inc. provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform. Vizioncore’s software products support essential IT strategies, including business continuity, high availability and disaster recovery.”

With this move Roger stays in the Virtualization world where he has worked for the past couple of years, however moving from a fully Open Source based technology to a back to a proprietary environment.

The bigger question however is .. who else will be leaving Citrix/ XenSource. and when ? XenSource has been with Citrix for about a year now .. maybe there are other people jumping ship.

DataCore’s SANsymphony and SANmelody Certified On Citrix XenServer 5

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DataCore Software, provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that its SANsymphony and SANmelody products have been certified on Citrix‘s newest XenServer 5 release as virtual SAN appliances, as well as on both standard servers and blades. With XenServer 5, Citrix has optimized Citrix XenApp performance on XenServer virtual machines. According to Citrix, this enables XenApp workloads to be virtualized with as little as 7% overhead and as many as 73% more users than XenApp workloads virtualized with competing products. Citrix XenApp (formerly Citrix Presentation Server) is used by more than 100 million users and 99% of the Fortune Global 500.

DataCore Virtual SAN appliance and storage virtualization software are certified for XenServer 5
Through its own rigorous testing, Citrix has certified that both SANsymphony and SANmelody software support XenServer 5 virtual machines as shared storage pools with advanced storage virtualization functions critical to demanding virtual server environments. The manufacturer-independent features include fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, remote replication to disaster recovery sites, non-disruptive virtual data migration, thin provisioning and high speed caching for performance acceleration.
DataCore Software

Marathon Enters Into Distribution Agreement with Ingram Micro

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Marathon Technologies, provider of high availability software for physical and virtual servers, today announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with the exclusive Citrix XenServer distributor in North America, Ingram Micro.

Under terms of the agreement, Ingram Micro will offer Marathon’s everRun high availability and disaster recovery software to its resellers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Included in the distribution agreement is Marathon’s everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization that is integrated with Citrix XenServer. Citrix XenServer is a dynamic virtualization software platform that virtualizes application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. The combination of Citrix XenServer high-performance, easy-to-use virtualization hypervisor with the proven automated availability of Marathon’s everRun software, enables more organizations to deploy virtualization across a much broader array of applications.

Marathon’s everRun software is for IT professionals who want to prevent outages and data loss in their physical and virtual infrastructures. everRun provides fault-tolerant, high availability for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server to deliver uninterrupted availability, 100 percent data protection, and rapid recovery through a “one-click” operation. Unlike bolt-on failover, cluster, or data replication products that place the burden on the IT professional, everRun software is completely automated. It makes high availability and disaster recovery easy to manage and cost effective for both midsize companies and enterprises.