datacenter virtualization

TBD Networks Goes For Full DataCenter Virtualization With TBDVirtualFabric-VME

August 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

TBDVirtualFabric-VMware Edition (VME) provides the missing pieces for companies to realize the full benefits of Datacenter Virtualization by unifying physical and virtual firewalls and network infrastructure. TBDVirtualFabric-VME was specifically designed to provide a virtual fabric of networking, security, and firewall capabilities to scale VMware environments beyond current limitations.

“TBDVirtualFabric-VME naturally extends the benefits that VMware and VMotion create in current virtual environments,” commented Thomas Ludwig, CEO of TBD Networks. “It delivers benefits of full Datacenter Virtualization within minutes of installation. TBDVirtualFabric-VME automatically discovers the entire physical and virtual network (including firewalls, switches and VLANs), and gives administrators an intuitive GUI to define network topologies, high-availability and security policies. The result is a virtualized environment that complies with enterprise standards and scales to large deployments without giving up on the flexibility of datacenter-wide VMotion.”

TBDVirtualFabric-VME helps companies maximize their return on investment from Datacenter Virtualization efforts. It reduces networking bottlenecks, especially in multi vendor networks (supporting leading vendors such as Cisco, Foundry and Juniper), without compromising security by reducing hardware requirements, and improving the utilization of existing hardware and network links. TBDVirtualFabric-VME permits companies to provision, manage, and reconfigure networks at the speed of business. In addition to improved network performance, availability, and QoS, it can simultaneously help companies reduce security risks and network threats.

TBDVirtualFabric-VME is currently available in beta.

VMware Eyes Chinese Market, Signs OEM Agreement With Inspur

June 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware and Inspur today announced an OEM agreement to further accelerate the adoption of VMware virtualization in China. Starting today, Inspur is selling, distributing and fully supporting VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure, on Inspur server systems.

The two companies will collaborate on market development, product sales, professional training and customer acquisition as well as technical services.

“China’s rapid economic growth and increased focus on conserving energy have spurred the need for customers to adopt the best solutions for meeting business demands while enabling a green datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “VMware virtualization addresses this need with solutions that not only consolidate servers, but also jump ahead to the next stages of virtualization: aggregating IT resources in virtualized pools and automating the management of these resources. VMware virtualization combined with Inspur’s expertise in local customer requirements offers a way to quickly cut operating and capital costs by as much as half, deliver applications faster and more reliably in virtual machines, improve information security, and run a more flexible and eco-friendly IT environment.”

Customers can now purchase Inspur servers bundled with VMware Infrastructure 3, provided with full support from Inspur.

[Source: Welt Online]

Nortel Spinoff Blade Network Technologies Aims To Virtualize Datacenter Racks

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

BLADE Network Technologies, the data-center server-switch company spun off from Nortel two years ago, announces the availability of its new RackSwitch network virtualization switches—the only switches designed specifically for IBM’s iDataPlex, an inexpensive, custom-configured rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency to address Web 2.0-style computing (see iDataPlex coverage on GigaOM and Ars Technica).

From the press release:

RackSwitch provides the high-bandwidth communications for IBM iDataPlex in today’s massive scale-out data centers that run I/O-intensive Web 2.0 applications and seek to make the most efficient use of the cloud computing model. Leveraging IBM and BLADE’s common blade server heritage, RackSwitch enables iDataPlex to increase the density networking within a single rack, use significantly less power for networking while maximizing bandwidth available to a single system, employ server-friendly cooling of the networking subsystem and provide 100-percent interoperability with existing network infrastructures. BLADE’s RackSwitch delivers standardized networking with the lowest latency and highest throughput, line-rate/non-blocking switching performance at 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit, with stacking and unified management.

Blade claims leadership in this particular market, having installed more than four million ports connecting more than 800,000 HP, IBM and NEC server blades, with products deployed across 26 market segments.

BLADE’s RackSwitch G8100, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 24 lossless, low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) ports, is designed to equip iDataPlex in high-performance clusters that require 10 Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth with latency of 300 nanoseconds or less. BLADE’s RackSwitch G8000, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for uplinks and/or stacking, is designed for the use of iDataPlex for emerging high-volume cloud computing environments.

BLADE’s new RackSwitch products are available for iDataPlex in the US and Canada in June and globally by the end of the year at a starting price of US$5,500. The company will demonstrate the new switches at next week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas.

[Source: New York Times / NetworkWorld]