software

Apani Pushes EpiForce VM as Virtual Appliance (Free Trial)

September 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Apani, provider of cross-platform server isolation solutions for large enterprises, today announced that EpiForce VM is now available as a virtual appliance free trial. EpiForce VM is the industry’s first software-based solution that secures corporate networks, containing both physical and virtual machines, from a single platform.

EpiForce VM is part of Apani’s security software product family and provides enterprises the ability to adopt a single security solution that will protect mixed data centers. From legacy systems to contemporary platforms and now virtualized environments, Apani’s EpiForce product line is the silver bullet for enterprise IT departments looking to simplify security enforcement and move away from a silo approach to protecting the inside of the corporate network.

The EpiForce VM virtual appliance free trial is a fully functioning version of EpiForce VM designed to install and run as a VMware VI3 appliance. The trial version includes two virtual machines (VMs) with agents pre-installed and license keys for up to 10 agents that can be installed on any physical or virtual Windows or Red Hat Linux platform. A complete video tutorial and training guide is included to help security administrators to configure and test EpiForce VM in their own environment.

EpiForce VM is based on the EpiForce platform v2.5 and initially supports VMware ESX Server 3.0 and 3.5 and uses on-demand policy distribution to offer enterprises the ability to manage and deploy policy to thousands of virtual or physical servers and endpoints with no impact to the network, application or user. EpiForce VM offers a centralized management console that enables a consolidated view to manage all EpiForce VM-protected machines — whether they are virtual or physical, without regard to their physical location on the network. Persistent security policy management allows administrators to utilize VMotion or Virtual Center to migrate EpiForce VM-protected virtual machines from one physical host to another with no disruption of security policy, minimizing unplanned downtime and maximizing operational flexibility.

Sanbolic Bridges Hyper-V And Shared Storage Networks

July 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Sanbolic today announced (PDF) that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machines can now be stored on a single shared storage area network (SAN) storage volume using Sanbolic Kayo File System. The virtual machines can then be moved independently between physical host servers using Quick Migration because all host servers have shared access to the virtual machines.

“Kayo FS is a new product that provides file-level shared access to a SAN volume from multiple physical host servers and is designed specifically to provide a cost-effective shared LUN solution for Hyper-V virtual machines,” said Momchil Michailov, Sanbolic’s founder. “Sanbolic is already shipping Melio FS, which is an advanced clustered file system with byte-range locking that can also provide concurrent read/write access to application data on SAN storage from multiple Windows physical or virtual servers. Kayo FS is aimed at a much broader group of customers who we expect will adopt server virtualization now that it is component of the Windows Server 2008 platform.”

Sanbolic’s product portfolio also includes Melio clustered file system and LaScala volume manager, which are designed to support Windows applications which benefit from central administration of a large virtual storage pool simultaneously accessed by multiple physical or virtual servers. Melio FS uses 64 bit architecture, allowing very large volume and file system sizes.

These products can utilize any fibre channel or iSCSI storage hardware. Windows directory, reporting, and clustering features are supported. The file system also incorporates quality of service assignment to allow prioritization of defined workloads in storage bandwidth-constrained environments.

Kayo FS will be priced at $299 per host server and sold in a 5 license bundle.

[Source: Scott Lowe]

Sanbolic

The Gap Between Hardware and Software

April 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Interesting read over at EE Times Asia, titled “IC industry addresses multicore, programming software gap“.

An excerpt:

“The semiconductor industry is starting to address what’s being called a software gap between a rising tide of multicore processors and a lack of parallel programming tools and techniques to make use of them.

The gap came into stark focus in the embedded world at the Multicore Expo, where chipmakers Freescale Semiconductor, Intel Corp., MIPS and a handful of silicon startups sketched out directions for their multicore products. Others warned that the industry has its work cut out for it delivering the software that will harness the next-generation chips.”

“There is a major gap between the hardware and the software,” said Eric Heikkila, director of embedded hardware research at Venture Development Corp. (VDC).

About 55 % of embedded system developers surveyed by VDC said they are using or will use multicore processors in the next 12 months. That fact is fueling the company’s projections that the market for embedded multicore processors will grow from about $372 million in 2007 to $2.47 billion in 2011.

In the PC market, the figures are even more dramatic. About 40 % of all processors Intel shipped in 2007 used multiple cores, but that will rise to 95 % in 2011, said Doug Davis, general manager of Intel’s embedded group.

But on the software side, vendors reported that only about 6 % of their tools were ready for parallel chips in 2007, a figure that will only rise to 40 % in 2011, VDC said. As much as 85 % of all embedded programming is now done in C or C++, languages that are “difficult to optimize for multicore,” said Heikkila.

Standardization

The Multicore Association announced at the Multicore Expo it has completed work on an applications programming interface for communications between cores, and is now working to define a standard for embedded virtualization.

“The ultimate goal of every computer scientist is to create a new language, but my personal view is we should not do it this time around,” said Wen-mei Hwu, a veteran researcher in parallel programming and professor of engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, referring to a flowering of languages developed for big parallel computers two decades ago, many of which never gained traction. I believe there will be new language constructs in C/C++ to support some of the new frameworks people will develop, but even these constructs, if we are not careful, will not be widely adopted,” Hwu said. “Ultimately, I think we will make a small amount of extensions to C, but I think it’s too early.”

On-chip fabric

For their part, Freescale and Intel sketched out design trends they see on the horizon for their multicore chips.

“Freescale is now sampling the first dual-core versions of its PowerQuicc processors, aimed at telecom OEMs. The chips are part of a family that will eventually scale to 32-core devices”, said Dan Cronin, VP of R&D for Freescale’s networking division.

The processors will use a new on-chip interconnect fabric. They will also embed in hardware a hypervisor, a kind of low-level scheduling unit, co-developed with IBM according to specs set in the Power.org group. “Freescale will release an open source reference design for companies that want to build virtualization software that taps into the hypervisor”, Cronin said.

[Source: VMBlog]