virtualisation

Fujitsu Launches Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure as a Service in the UK

July 28, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Fujitsu has today announced the availability of a range of new on-demand Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings including a storage service and a development infrastructure service. The new services will benefit organisations looking for the flexibility and cost effectiveness associated with cloud computing but who are nervous about the security and reliability of the public cloud.

As well as the new offerings themselves, Fujitsu will provide consultancy and integration services to help customers make the most efficient use of IaaS.

Fujitsu’s storage service provides tiered information management capabilities in four critical areas; storage capacity with block or file access, data protection and archive infrastructure, all available as a service using the right storage infrastructure to achieve optimum cost efficiency.

Fujitsu will be hosting the services using its own high-security UK-based data centres – a significant factor as organisations become increasingly concerned about the legal ramifications of allowing their data to be stored outside the UK. For top security and high performance systems Fujitsu also offers a private service on the customer’s premises using their own retained data centres.

In response to the tight timescales and unpredictable workload peaks of development projects, Fujitsu’s new development infrastructure service reduces the cost and risk of project delays by providing server and storage infrastructure on a weekly basis. This will eliminate wasted resources and allow project teams to scale-up with fast provisioning of additional resources. Fujitsu is finalising a service designed for live production business systems, which will be available later this year.

Fujitsu’s storage and server services use advanced technology from leading brands, EMC, Cisco and Fujitsu, providing enterprise class performance and functionality that is trusted by major corporations around the world.

There will be a further announcement detailing the full Infrastructure as a Service suite in the Autumn.

Earnings: VMware’s Q2 2009

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced financial results for the second quarter 2009 (emphasis ours):

Revenues for the second quarter were $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008.
Non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $96 million, a decrease of 14% from the second quarter of 2008. GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $38 million, a decrease of 38% from the second quarter of 2008.
Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $80 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, compared to $92 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2008. GAAP net income for the second quarter was $33 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, compared to $52 million, or $0.13 per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2008.
Cash and cash equivalents were $2.3 billion and total deferred revenues were $934 million as of June 30, 2009. Compared to the same period a year ago, cash increased 48% and deferred revenue increased 30%. Since the beginning of 2009, cash increased 24% and deferred revenue increased 7%.
Non-GAAP operating cash flows for the quarter were $233 million, an increase of 19% from the second quarter of 2008. GAAP operating cash flows were $243 million, an increase of 62% from the second quarter of 2008. For the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2009, non-GAAP operating cash flows were $910 million and GAAP operating cash flows were $1 billion.

US revenues for the second quarter declined 3% to $234 million from the second quarter of 2008. International revenues for the second quarter grew 3% to $222 million from the second quarter of 2008.

Services revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were $228 million, an increase of 32% from the second quarter of 2008. Driven by the challenging macro economic environment, license revenues were $228 million, a decline of 20% from last year.

Recent Strategic Announcements and Highlights:

On May 21, VMware announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4 with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe. In June, VMware vSphere 4 was named the Best of Interop 2009 Grand Prize Winner and won the Best of Interop Award in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category at Interop Las Vegas.
VMware announced record storage performance for VMware vSphere 4, outperforming any virtualization solution on the market and nearly quadrupling its previous record. According to data collected with VMware Capacity Planner, most demanding databases usually require a few thousand IOPS in storage performance. For example, an Oracle database averages 1,280 IOPS for a 4-way Oracle virtual machine. VMware vSphere 4 exceeds this requirement from a single server — and can power up to: 700,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, 273 4-way Oracle databases.
VMware and HP expanded the companies’ strong relationship with VMware signing an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter(TM) suite and working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives. In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp(TM) with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives.
On July 13, VMware announced advancements in virtualization management with the general availability of two new products: VMware vCenter AppSpeed and VMware vCenter Chargeback. VMware also announced a major release of VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. These new management products simplify and automate key IT processes such as application performance monitoring, chargeback, and management of dev/test environments to increase IT productivity in the datacenter — delivering more value to customers as they scale out their virtual environments.

Earnings: Citrix’ Q2 2009

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Citrix today reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2009 ended June 30, 2009. In the second quarter of fiscal 2009, Citrix achieved revenue of $393 million, compared to $392 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2008.

Non-GAAP net income in the second quarter of fiscal 2009 was $72 million, or $0.39 per diluted share, compared to $71 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, in the comparable period last year.

Non-GAAP net income excludes the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations and stock-based compensation expense and the tax effects related to those items. In addition, Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter of 2009 excludes charges recorded in connection with the restructuring program that the company implemented in January 2009, and the tax effects related to those items.

In reviewing the second quarter results for 2009, compared to the second quarter of 2008:

Product license revenue decreased 15 percent;
Revenue from license updates grew 9 percent;
Online services revenue grew 18 percent;
Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 3 percent;
Revenue increased in the America’s region by 3 percent, decreased in the EMEA region by 12 percent, and decreased in the Pacific region by 4 percent;
Deferred revenue totaled $538 million, compared to $476 million on June 30, 2008;
GAAP operating margin was 10 percent for the quarter, and non-GAAP operating margin was 22 percent for the quarter, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense and costs associated with the restructuring program;
Cash flow from operations was $86 million; and
The company repurchased 1.3 million shares at an average price of $30.32.

During the second quarter of 2009, Citrix:

Announced the availability of the Citrix Receiver application on the Apple App Store. The app gives iPhone and iPod touch users access to their Windows applications and documents from anywhere;
Unveiled Citrix NetScaler VPX, a new software-based virtual appliance version of its industry-leading NetScaler MPX hardware appliance product line;
Announced upgrades to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V that adds advanced virtualization management capabilities to two of the industry’s fastest growing virtualization platforms;
Announced nCore technology that allows its high-end Citrix NetScaler appliances to deliver rich Web 2.0 applications and cloud services for more users with no new hardware investments required;
Announced the addition of three new appliance models to its powerful Citrix NetScaler product line – NetScaler MPX 9500, MPX 7500 and MPX 5500;
Announced that LG-Nortel will distribute the Citrix NetScaler product line to enterprise customers in the Korean market; and
Unveiled Citrix Dazzle – a self-service “storefront” for enterprise applications. Dazzle gives corporate employees 24×7 self-service access to a broad array of applications, desktops and content, allowing them to choose exactly what they need, when they need it.

PHD Virtual Extends esXpress Support To VMware vSphere 4

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4.

This new release of esXpress version 3.6 also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above. An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines. New performance enhancements include:

Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

Release: Veeam nworks Management Pack for MSCOM 5.0

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today released version 5.0 of its nworks Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Smart Plug-in for HP Operations Manager.

The products allow customers to leverage their investments in Microsoft Operations Manager and HP Operations Manager to monitor and manage VMware vSphere virtual environments from within the enterprise management console already in place.

With version 5.0, Veeam has improved the operational aspects of the products for enhanced scalability and a lower total cost of ownership, all while remaining agentless on the ESX server. A new component called the nworks Management Center dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing by managing multiple instances of the nworks Collector in large enterprise deployments. Expanded support for VMware vSphere and enterprise-class centralized administration ensure that these VMware Ready Optimized nworks solutions from Veeam are “future proofed” and optimized for the world’s largest enterprise deployments.

New features in version 5.0 include:

Full, native support for vSphere 4 – Preconfigured monitoring of new features in vSphere 4, including Distributed Power Management, Host Profiles and Virtual Applications (vApp).
New nworks Management Center – a new web-based administrative interface dramatically improves scalability, high availability and load balancing, and simplifies the deployment configuration and usability of multiple instances of the nworks MP and SPI throughout the enterprise.
High availability – the centralized license and configuration features of the new Management Center make it possible to create “hot standby” nworks Collectors. Any nworks Collector “heartbeat” failure automatically triggers redistribution of the failed Collector’s jobs to a standby Collector, assuring no lapse in monitoring availability.
Load balancing – in enterprises using multiple instances of the nworks Collectors, monitoring jobs are automatically assigned using the Balance feature, optimizing workload distribution and eliminating the need to configure individual Collectors.
License server – now a pool of licenses is shared across all enterprise instances of the nworks Collector, greatly simplifying deployment in large, dynamic environments.

The nworks MP and SPI from Veeam have both been qualified through the VMware Ready testing process and are certified as VMware Ready Optimized products. The nworks MP and SPI are VMware endorsed solutions for VMware management per the VMware Ready Management program, providing customer assurance that these Veeam products not only offer lower integration costs today, but also will support VMware infrastructure future directions.

The Veeam nworks MP and SPI 5.0 are both available immediately, with North American pricing remaining at $450 USD per socket for the MP and $690 USD per socket for the SPI.

Industry Moves: Patrick Malaperiman New VP and General Manager, EMEA For Univa

July 23, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Univa UD has named Patrick Malaperiman as its new Vice President and General Manager, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Malaperiman has over 15 years experience in technology strategy and sales for some of the most successful IT companies in existence, including VMware and Novell. As head of Univa’s operations in EMEA, Patrick Malaperiman will oversee strategic business and sales in these key regions, where Univa is experiencing significant increases in demand.

Before joining Univa, Malaperiman was VP EMEA at PlateSpin, which was sold in 2008 to Novell where Malaperiman stayed on as VP EMEA for Novell’s Systems & Resource Management (SRM) business unit. At PlateSpin, Malaperiman was the first EMEA employee and in 3.5 years grew the team to 35 people, a team that accounted for 40% of global revenue. At Novell, Malaperiman led their SRM business unit, which included Novell’s ZENworks systems management portfolio in addition to PlateSpin and Managed Objects.

Prior to PlateSpin, Malaperiman was one of the first 15 employees in EMEA at VMware where as Channel Director for Northern Europe he defined the overall channel strategy and was responsible for identifying, recruiting and driving revenue with distributors and resellers within the geography. In less than a year he established a committed enterprise channel delivering significant revenue for the fastest growing software company in IT history.

Prior to VMware, Malaperiman held senior-level channel and business development positions at Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Digital Equipment Corp., and several other global technology companies.