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Cisco Ups Stake In VMware

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Cisco announced yesterday that it will acquire an increased equity stake in VMware.

Cisco will purchase 500,000 shares of VMware Class A common stock currently held by Intel for approximately $13.3M. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.7% percent of VMware’s total outstanding common stock.

Cisco’s purchase is intended to build on the strong inter-company collaboration between Cisco and VMware in the adoption of the companies’ virtualization products and solutions that address the intersection of virtualization and networking technologies.

In September, 2008, Cisco and VMware announced several joint initiatives in the data center virtualization market including the launch of the The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch, enhanced professional services and reseller certification training

Intel Picks Up NetEffect for $8 Million

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Intel Corporation today announced its acquisition of the assets of NetEffect, a network connectivity solutions company specializing in Ethernet products and technologies for server compute clusters.

Intel purchased NetEffect’s assets for $8 million, which include the company’s Ethernet product portfolio, intellectual property and technology. NetEffect was a provider of solutions incorporating iWARP, an Ethernet alternative to InfiniBand. NetEffect’s product portfolio includes 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) adapters for servers and blade configurations as well as 10 GbE Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

Designed for multi-core processor-based servers and optimized for virtualization, Intel’s current portfolio of 10GbE server adapters includes single and dual port versions for both copper and fiber implementations. The NetEffect acquisition provides complementary High Performance Network Interface Card (NIC) products to Intel’s Ethernet portfolio.

NetEffect was founded in 1998 as Banderacom, a company focused on InfiniBand adapters and 16-port IB switch, and was recapitalized in 2004 as NetEffect. Thirty employees, primarily engineers, have joined the Intel team from NetEffect and will continue to be based in Austin, Texas.

Intel

VirtualLogix VLX Adds Support for Intel-Based Mobile Internet Devices

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VirtualLogix (previous coverage) today announced that its VLX virtualization solution will be supporting the latest Intel Atom processor Z5XX series-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

Device makers using VLX on these MIDs can simplify hardware designs, reduce costs and enhance the end-user experience through improved quality of voice, multimedia services and stronger security capabilities. VirtualLogix VLX also offers complete power management support for virtualized environments, which reduces MIDs’ overall energy consumption.

The VLX hypervisor integrates transparently into a Windows or a Linux-based MID with no re-installation of the native operating system (OS) and no intrusion into the existing user environment. As a result, customers can use VLX’s flexible software architecture to securely separate critical applications while boosting the quality of service offerings. Additionally, by servicing the virtual appliances while the main application OS and associated hardware resources are not in use, VLX improves power consumption management.

The demand for next-generation devices is expanding. In a recent report, “Mobile Internet Device (MID) & Chip Market Opportunities,” Forward Concepts forecasted MID shipment growth from 305,000 units in 2008 to 39.6 million units in 2012.

Azure Uses Intel Virtualization Extensions To Counter Malware

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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]

Hitachi Moves Forward With Virtage Embedded Virtualization

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Hitachi yesterday announced that it would add Intel’s 9100 series Itanium chips to its high-end BladeSymphony 1000 systems, as well as its lower-end BladeSymphony 320 servers. Additionally, Hitachi will begin offering the latest dual-core Intel Xeon 5200 series processors along with Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with both sets of BladeSymphony systems.

Hitachi is looking to leverage its legacy mainframe technology, especially virtualization, to offer an alternative in a crowded field that is full of systems aimed at data center consolidation projects.

Virtage

What Hitachi is offering is called Virtage, an embedded hardware virtualization technology that provides an abstraction layer that decouples the physical system from the operating system to provide utilization and additional flexibility. Since the virtualization is built into the hardware itself, it is more reliable and secure than virtualization based on a hypervisor, according to Hitachi.

Hitachi doesn’t have a lot of market share though. In the latest survey by IDC (confirmed by Gartner as well), HP was first in overall server revenue with more than $3.7 billion in global sales, and the company also controlled 46.9 percent of the worldwide $1.2 billion blade market during the first quarter of 2008.

Meanwhile, Hitachi did not finish in either the top five in the United States or in the worldwide market, where HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens all dominate.

[Source: eWeek]

Unisys Introduces New Quad-Core AMD Server, Integrates Virtualization Services

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Unisys is releasing a number of virtualization services and its first server based on AMD quad-core processors, the company announced Wednesday according to Network World.

Unisys

Unisys, historically an Intel-only shop, decided the time was right for an AMD-based server after getting wind of the Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology in quad-core Opteron processors. These chip enhancements allow virtual machines to more directly manage memory, thus improving performance of virtualized applications. The result for Unisys is the new ES7000 Model 7405R, an eight-socket, quad-core server that can support up to 128 virtual machines.

Pricing for the AMD-based server starts at $21,000 and can go up to $50,000 or so depending on the configuration.

Unisys coupled its AMD-based server announcement with new professional services for virtualized servers, storage and Windows desktops. Here’s a quick look at each service:

  • 3D Blueprinting for Virtualization. Utilizing business and systems modeling software, Unisys says this service defines objectives for virtualization, maps business goals to IT objectives and establishes an implementation strategy.
  • Virtualization Operational Readiness Assessment. This is designed to give customers a full understanding of virtualization’s impact on the data center before deployment. “Using a workshop approach, clients can determine how they must change business and IT processes for virtualization, identify gaps, prioritize areas for change and assess technology and people and process issues that can impact implementation,” Unisys states in a press release.
  • Consolidated Desktop Solution. Using Microsoft technologies and a Unisys session broker, this service helps Windows shops host desktops on centralized servers and storage systems and give users access with thin clients.
  • Consolidated Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. With this service, Unisys makes it easier to consolidate hardware devoted to Exchange. Customers often have hundreds of servers for the various Exchange applications, and need a system that can save energy and make sure all servers receive the right patches, says Mark Feverston, general manager of Microsoft solutions for Unisys.
  • Unisys Storage Virtualization. This service helps customers integrate storage into one virtualized pool that can be managed with a single interface.

Read the rest of the article here.