Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
VMware has lost a key executive today with the departure of Nand Mulchandani, former Senior Director of Security Products, who has decided to take on a job as CEO for OpenDNS instead of staying on at the troubled virtualization leader.
Virtual Iron has lost its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh, who started his own consulting business.
According to Alessandro, Virtual Iron just lost its Chief Strategy Officer Tony Asaro, although it seems he’s remaining a Senior Advisor to the company. We reported on his hiring nearly 8 months ago.
Asaro used to be a senior analyst and consultant for the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), in which role he worked as a trusted advisor to technology start-ups, emerging vendors and multi-billion dollar companies.
Sandeep Bhangi, Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances, will be assuming his role from now on.
Virtual Iron Software today announced it has expanded its business relationship with LeftHand Networks by joining LeftHand’s Technology Alliance Program. Together, the companies offer enterprise-class server and storage virtualization capabilities to the mainstream market and enable more users to take advantage of the significant benefits of virtual infrastructure management.
Virtual Iron provides a comprehensive, enterprise-class server virtualization and management platform without the cost and complexity of comparable alternatives. LeftHand Networks leads the iSCSI SAN market and its SAN solutions built with the SAN/iQ storage software enable an infrastructure that enhances storage utilization, data protection and virtualized server availability. The combined solutions offer customers highly available and completely scalable virtualized server and storage environments that provide immediate improvements in resource utilization, simplified patch management, back up and disaster recovery for more cost-effective capacity management.
Open-E, a provider of unified IP storage management software, today announced that Open-E Data Storage Server (DSS) has been certified for use with Virtual Iron’s server virtualization software. Environments deploying both Virtual Iron and Open-E Data Storage Server will benefit from streamlined virtual infrastructure, improved server and storage utilization and robust business continuity.
Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class server virtualization capabilities on a next-generation architecture. The platform combines the leading open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate for easy movement of workloads, LiveRecovery for automated virtual machine failover, LiveCapacity for dynamic workload balancing, and LiveSnapshot for hot backup and patch management. These capabilities enable offloaded, space efficient and no-downtime backups on live virtual machines running in production environments.
Smooth integration of Open-E DSS with Virtual Iron provides simple and efficient storage consolidation that supports capital and operational cost reduction throughout the IT environment. DSS brings enterprise-class functionality, enhanced manageability and proven reliability to small and medium businesses that depend on server/storage infrastructure for continued business operations. As a result, companies have a cost-effective avenue toward advanced IT to strengthen their competitive advantage.
The company has also announced general availability of Data Storage Server (DSS) for VMware ESX 3.5. VMware provides TAP program members with tools to develop products that are complementary to VMware virtualization software and help deliver high-value solutions to joint customers. Data Storage Server for VMware ESX 3.5 will provide mutual customers with enhanced capabilities for consolidating storage environments.
Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program, which was first announced in November 2007, and launched last June with the patricipation of Citrix, Sun, Novell and Virtual Iron, signed up two notable new members.
Cisco has announced its membership and is already included on the SVVP website, and VMware signed up pretty late so they’re not on there yet (but Chris Wolf had already confirmed the news). Microsoft and VMware had been working diligently for several months on the completion of their support agreement and VMware’s inclusion in the SVVP, and this will evidently drive virtualization adoption even further the coming months and years.
The costs associated with joining the program include membership in TSAnet at Mission Critical level, so that the vendor and Microsoft can share support information, incremental costs, if any, to perform the validation tests, and a nominal expense (currently $250) to qualify each ‘configuration’ that is submitted for validation.
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Virtual Iron Software today announced new power management capabilities in the latest version of its software, Virtual Iron Version 4.4. This release extends Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure management capabilities with the addition of LivePower, a new experimental feature that optimizes power usage to deliver significant cost-savings and environmental benefits across the data center.
LivePower, available with Virtual Iron Version 4.4, optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on pre-defined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and live migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.
Virtual Iron also became the first server virtualization software provider to announce support for Intel Dynamic Power Node Manager, which will be available with Intel Next Generation Platform (Nehalem-EP). Node Manager utilizes processor and platform level instrumentation, controls, and OS features to monitor, report, and control system power. Node Manager, in combination with Virtual Iron’s LivePower, enables users to automatically maintain power budgets, turn servers off and on, and optimize power consumption.
Virtual Iron Version 4.4 will be generally available later this month with LivePower.