hardware virtualization

Pivot3 Asks: Who Needs Servers Anyway?

August 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Pivot3 today announced a “technology breakthrough”, allowing for the elimination of servers for most applications that store information. Pivot3 Serverless Computing allows customers to absorb compute-intensive workloads, now performed using stand-alone application servers, into Pivot3’s X86-based storage nodes.

Pivot3 Serverless Computing also enables environments that have not typically been considered good candidates for conventional server virtualization deployments, because of the technology’s unique performance characteristics.

“Pivot3 has taken advantage of the openness and high performance of the Xen hypervisor to deliver a powerful new architecture for storage subsystems,” said Ian Pratt, chairman of xen.org. “Xen virtualization is rapidly becoming embedded in all components of enterprise IT architectures, from servers, to storage and network appliances.”

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“As Pivot3 works with its partners to apply Pivot3 Serverless Computing to the general marketplace, we believe we can enable a significant reduction to the carbon footprint of today’s datacenter. We intend to help our customers do more on fixed power and physical space constraints while insuring they are as efficient and responsible as technology will allow,” added Bob Fernander, chief executive officer of Pivot3.

Pivot3 Serverless Computing technology, and products based on the technology will be announced and made generally available this fall.

Pivot3

Azure Uses Intel Virtualization Extensions To Counter Malware

July 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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Paul Royal, principal researcher at Damballa, has developed a new tool called Azure, which takes advantage of the virtualization extensions in Intel‘s chips to evade the virtual machine and sandbox checks malware authors often include in their ‘work’. Because the extensions exist at the hardware level, below the level of the host OS, the malware doesn’t have the ability to detect Azure, allowing researchers to analyze its behavior unimpeded.

“The whole point is to get out of the guest OS so the malware can’t detect you and attack,” said Royal. “Intel VT doesn’t have the weakness of in-guest approaches because it’s completely external. Others use system emulators, but to get everything exactly right in terms of emulation can be tricky.”

Royal plans to release the source code for Azure at the upcoming Black Hat conference in Las Vegas and will make the tool available for download, as well. Royal said he is still working on features that he plans to add to a future version of Azure, including a precision automated unpacker and a system call tracer.

Intel’s virtualization technology (VT) is a set of extensions added to some of the company’s chipsets that help implement virtualization on the hardware, rather than the software level. VT is designed to help enterprises make better use of their hardware resources and save energy.

[Source: SearchSecurity]

Wind River Releases Proprietary Hypervisor For Hardware Virtualization

June 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Wind River Systems, the California, US-based provider of Device Software Optimization (DSO), today introduced a multicore software solution for device development, which aims to help companies solve complex business challenges by taking advantage of multicore processing and virtualization.

In connection with today’s announcement, Wind River announced that it will introduce a scalable hypervisor that aims to enable virtualization for devices across a broad range of vertical markets, including networking, industrial and consumer devices. The ability to virtualize hardware allows multiple operating environments to share underlying processing cores, memory and other hardware resources.

Wind River’s hypervisor will incorporate the same design practices and technology that Wind River uses for its products, such as Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS). The hypervisor will be tightly integrated with VxWorks and Wind River Linux, and can support a variety of other operating systems. It will be available for early access in August 2008.

Cisco To Acquire Remaining Interest In Nuova Systems

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

And why were Dante Malagrino of Cisco and Ed Bugnion of Nuova Systems jointly featured in the video presentation of Cisco Nexus 5000 we shared earlier today?

Start-up Nuova Systems operated as a majority-owned subsidiary of Cisco, which had invested $70 million and owned 80 % of the company. Cisco announced its initial investment in Nuova in August 2006 and announced an amendment to the agreement in April 2007 that expanded the development scope, increased the funding commitment and raised the maximum potential payout of the transaction to $678 million. And now Cisco has formally expressed its intent to acquire remaining interest in the company.

From the press release:

“Cisco today announced its intent to purchase the remaining 20 % interest in San Jose-based Nuova Systems, a start up focused on the development of next-generation products for the data center market. Cisco today also introduced the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series, the first product developed by Nuova. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet “top-of-rack” switch that offers unified fabric capabilities through the support for multiple data center networking protocols and software intelligence.”

The Nuova transaction is success-based with the total value primarily determined by the revenue of Nuova products over three measurement periods. The first measurement period will commence in early fiscal year 2010, the second measurement period will commence in late fiscal year 2010, and the third measurement period will commence in mid fiscal year 2011. The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of Cisco’s FY 2008. It will be acquisition No. 126 for Cisco overall and the fifth one in FY ’08.

Video: Cisco Nexus 5000 And Virtualization

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

DataCenterKnowledge posted a video presentation today we would love to share with you too. It features Dante Malagrino of Cisco and Ed Bugnion of Nuova Systems with an explanation of how data center managers can use the new Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches to optimize their virtualization efforts (Cisco recently introduced the 7000 Series). Prior to joining Cisco, Bugnion was a co-founder and chief architect of VMware.

Parallels Server Beta 2 Now Available In Public Beta

March 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Parallels, Inc. (formerly SWsoft) today announced that Beta 2 of its Parallels Server hardware virtualization solution is now available for immediate public download at www.parallels.com/server/beta.

Parallels Server is a hypervisor-based virtualization solution that provides the best value for Small and Medium-size Businesses (SMBs) and enterprise departments looking to maximize their IT investments via server hardware or legacy OS consolidation. Parallels Server can be installed on any server running Windows or Linux as well as any Intel-based Mac running OS X “Tiger” or “Leopard” and can be managed through the included Parallels Management Console.

“We are extending beta testing to everyone based on the positive results from our closed beta,” said Corey Thomas, Vice President of Consumer and Business Marketing, Parallels. “Feedback has been that it is easy to install and use, reliable and fast. We’ve incorporated feature requests and fixes into this latest version and feel confident that it’s ready for a broader set of beta users to experience.”

The new features include:

A Full Bare-metal Hypervisor that allows users to run multiple virtual machines directly on the host physical machine’s hardware, without depending on a host OS. This hypervisor implementation provides users with the fastest, most stable virtual machines possible.
An Integrated Toolset that enhances and simplifies the user experience. The toolset includes: Parallels Tools, a set of helpful add-ons that make working with virtual servers easier and more productive: Parallels Transporter, a built-in, wizard driven migration tool that can move the entire contents of a real machine to a virtual machine: and an integrated, single-click backup utility.
Virtual Support for 4-way Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP), which lets users assign up to 4 virtual cores to a virtual machine for exceptional performance under heavy workloads. 2-way SMP is also supported, giving users an unsurpassed level of virtual machine customization.
Experimental Support for Intel VT-d, enabling users to leverage full hardware-acceleration technologies for faster, more stable virtual machines and better resource management. Using VT-d, users can also directly assign hardware resources such as graphics and network cards to virtual machines, giving them native access to that hardware for optimal service levels. Parallels support of this feature is an industry first and is critically important to bringing virtual machine performance and functionality closer to that of real machines.

[Source: MacTech]