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Former VMware, Sun Microsystems Exec Dane C. Smith Joins ClearEdge Power

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Former VMware and Sun Microsystems executive Dane C. Smith joins Hillsboro-based ClearEdge Power as senior vice president of sales, marketing and business development.

The global leader in microCHP fuel cell design and manufacturing adds Smith as an integral part of the senior management team to leverage his expertise in market development and rapid expansion.

During Smith’s five-year tenure at VMware, as vice president and general manager for the Americas and later as global vice president of systems integration and outsourcing, he helped build one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, according to IDC and Gartner.

In three years, Smith grew business in the Americas from less than $200 million to approximately $1 billion, and he led the teams responsible for closing many of the largest software and services contracts in the company’s history. He was also a key member of the VMware executive team that, in August 2007, produced one of the largest technology IPOs in the history of the New York Stock Exchange – second only to Google.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with some of the nation’s largest energy providers, as well as the US Department of Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency, while at VMware and Sun,” said Smith. “I look forward to continuing those relationships to further alternative energy solutions in the U.S. and abroad as a leader for the ClearEdge Power team.”

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Sun Microsystems Unleashes VirtualBox 3.0, Adds Many Server Virtualization Features

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Sun Microsystems today announced a new version of Sun VirtualBox, its cross-platform virtualization software. VirtualBox 3.0 is capable of creating and running multi-processor virtual machines that can handle heavyweight server-class workloads, and also delivers enhanced graphics support for desktop-class workloads, reinforcing VirtualBox’s position as one of the world’s most popular virtualization platforms.

Many multi-threaded server-based workloads, such as database and Web applications, can benefit from Symmetric Multiple Processing (SMP) systems, which contain multiple CPUs. VirtualBox 3.0 can now support virtual SMP systems with up to 32 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in a single virtual machine. With this major enhancement, VirtualBox software can be used to run not only desktop workloads on client or server systems, but also demanding server workloads.

A key component of Sun’s industry-leading desktop-to-datacenter virtualization portfolio, VirtualBox software has been rapidly growing in popularity, surpassing 14.5 million downloads and 4 million registrations worldwide, as well as more than 25,000 downloads a day. A mere 50 megabyte download, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in just a few minutes.

New server features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Up to 32 vCPUs per guest to accommodate heavyweight data-processing workloads.
  • Hypervisor enhancements for SMP to enable optimum performance.
  • Updated API platform designed to be the basis of the community-driven VirtualBox Web Console project, which is coming soon to allow IT administrators to manage their datacenters from a Web console. This project is based on the popular Python language.

New desktop features of VirtualBox 3.0 software include:

  • Microsoft Direct3D support for Windows guests, which enables graphically intensive Windows applications, like computer modeling, 3D design and games software, to run in a virtual environment.
  • Support for version 2.0 of the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) standard. As a result, high-performance Windows, Linux, Solaris(TM), and OpenSolaris(TM) graphical applications, which typically use graphical hardware acceleration, are able to run applications like Google Earth and CAM-based software on VirtualBox software.
  • Support for a wider range of USB devices, including storage devices, iPods and phones.

VirtualBox software is free of charge for personal use. For wider deployments within an organization, Enterprise subscriptions are also available, starting at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 premium support from Sun’s technical team. Discounts are available based on volume.

Sun Updates OpenSolaris

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Sun announced the latest release of the OpenSolaris 2009.06 operating system, delivering features in networking, storage and virtualization, along with significant performance enhancements and developer productivity updates.

Central to the new release is the inclusion of Project Crossbow, the most significant networking technology development to Solaris in this decade. Extending the features that made the Solaris Operating System the world’s leading technology platform, OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a major step forward for enterprises looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest innovations from Sun and the OpenSolaris community.

As a follow on to Sun’s ZFS technology, which reinvented the fundamental concept of file systems, Project Crossbow’s complete re-architecture of the network stack becomes the new standard for how networking at the operating system level is done. This project delivers, for the first time, the networking capability designed for virtualization in combination with highly scaled, multiple-core, multi-threaded processors connected with extremely fast network interfaces. More information on Project Crossbow is available at: http://opensolaris.com/learn.

Project Crossbow’s virtual network interfaces provide full resource management to simplify administration of complex deployments of multi-tiered applications on a single machine or an entire datacenter. Combined with the ability to scale the workload of single or multiple network interfaces across multiple core and processor systems, up to the largest systems available in the world today, customers can increase network efficiency and performance. Available today, both of these networking enhancements are major milestones for an enterprise operating system and are likely to set a new standard for next generation operating system platforms.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 provides dozens of enhancements to the breakthrough technology of ZFS and encompasses it with a complete architecture of connectivity and protocol support. New, fully integrated flash storage support in ZFS helps to optimize large scale pools of very high performance storage by designating flash devices as write accelerators and read accelerators. These pools are automatically managed by ZFS to achieve extreme levels of performance across many workloads, making the need for small caches on RAID controllers obsolete.

Native support for Microsoft CIFS has been added as a full peer to NFS, as a high performance kernel with integrated features and support for Microsoft Windows semantics for security, naming and access rights, allowing transparent use and sharing of files across Windows, Linux and Solaris environments. To round out the complete storage capability, Sun has designed new, very high performance support for iSCSI and Fiberchannel block protocols into the Solaris kernel, allowing systems running OpenSolaris to participate as a client and a target for virtually any storage topology.

All of these storage features are integrated into the Solaris platform and take full advantage of its core functionality including: fault management, networking, multi-threaded scaling, performance, security and resource management capabilities.

With this announcement, Sun continues to deliver on a holistic, built-in virtualization design for networking, storage and application abstraction, raising performance and scale to new highs for the industry. Building on the advances in networking storage virtualization, the OpenSolaris platform delivers key server virtualization technologies in the form of Solaris Containers, Logical Domains (LDoms) for Sun CMT systems and the Xen-based hypervisor to give users a complete virtualization platform built directly into the OpenSolaris OS. One of the most widely deployed virtualization technologies in the world, Solaris Containers provide lightweight, agile, software-defined boundaries that can be used to create virtual servers for consolidating hundreds of existing enterprise-class workloads onto a single system. More information on the built-in virtualization capabilities of OpenSolaris is available here.

Sun To Virtualize … Good Old Tape Drives?

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Sun Microsystems has reportedly revealed plans to add one of the newest storage technologies into one of the oldest storage methods in use: tape drives. The news comes from VNUnet.com:

The company said on Tuesday that it will update its line of StorageTek tape drive systems with a new virtualisation manager.

Sun said that the latest version of the StorageTek drives would support tape capacities of up to 1TB, and overall system capacity of some 90TB.

StorageTek Virtual Systems Manager will allow companies to manage and operate data stored on tape backup for use in tasks such as archiving and disaster recovery.

The vendor hopes that the systems will appeal to companies looking to handle growing capacity while navigating the economic crisis. Sun’s tape storage units have maintained strong growth rates in recent months.

Industry Moves: Sun Microsystems Desktop Virtualization Expert Jefferi Holland Joins Systems Alliance

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Systems Alliance, a regional systems integrator providing high-value IT and business consulting services, today announced Jefferi V. Holland, formerly a senior desktop virtualization specialist and senior pre-sales engineer with Sun Microsystems, has joined the company as a senior technical architect.

With nearly 25 years of experience, Holland will lead the expansion of Systems Alliance’s consulting practice focused on desktop virtualization and thin-client computing.

Before joining Systems Alliance, Holland was an 11-year employee of Sun Microsystems, where for the past five years he was a senior technical specialist for the US Software Practice, responsible for architecting, recommending and deploying Sun’s virtual desktop technology. In this role, Holland developed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions for commercial and public-sector clients including United Airlines, Detroit Water and Sewage and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.

Prior to Sun, Holland was manager of engineering computer services at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Engineering, a systems engineer for Bundy Corporation, and an engineer at General Dynamics Land Systems Division Vehicle Systems Laboratory. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Detroit Mercy.