virtualisation

FastScale Ships New Release of Composer Suite, Adds Windows and RHEL 5.2 Support

July 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

FastScale Technology today announced (PDF) the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite, which it claims to be the only technology on the market today to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying server software environments for enterprise class data centers and Web farms, whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both. The new release adds support for Windows Server 2003 environments, new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.

The new features in detail:

New platform support – including deployment of Windows Server 2003 and RHEL 5.2 environments.
Lightweight application provisioning – for just-in-time, virtualized deployment of modular, enterprise class applications, enabling increased infrastructure performance and stateless server configurations.
Increased scalability & usability – with streamlined configuration settings, enhanced Web and command line interfaces, and easier navigation for large enterprise deployments.

FastScale Composer Suite with support for Windows is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000.

Xeround Raises $16 Million In Second Round

July 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Xeround, an Israel-based startup in the database virtualization area, today announced it has closed a $16 million round of Series B funding led by Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership. Also participating in the round were existing investors Benchmark Capital and Giza Venture Capital. The newly acquired funds will be used to increase sales and marketing activities as well as to step up research and development to advance the product roadmap.

Xeround has developed a live, scalable Intelligent Data Grid, a cloud computing database with data virtualization capabilities. With Xeround’s offerings, applications no longer need to know where data resides or if it is being managed with relational, hierarchical or object models.

“We chose to raise a round of strategic funding to help us broaden our reach in both North America and Europe and to invest further in sales, marketing and product development,” said Charlotte Yarkoni, CEO of Xeround, Inc. “We believe our business model and approach to data management will continue to provide a truly unique market offering that delivers the performance, scalability and flexibility to support numerous applications in the telecommunications industry and beyond.”

[Source: Blocks and Files]

BitLeap LeapServ Backup Software Goes Virtual

July 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Offsite backup provider BitLeap today announced it has extended its LeapServ software platform to customer provided VMware environments.

The new LeapServVM product will consist of a custom built VM system file supplied to the customer, which can be loaded into existing VMware environments to perform all of the services typically provided by a dedicated LeapServ network appliance.

The LeapServVM will be a licensed copy of BitLeap’s LeapServ technology when bundled with data backup or e-mail archiving services. While active, the software and its performance will be fully managed by BitLeap just like any traditional physical LeapServ appliance.

BitLeap’s CEO Guy Suter:

“The ability to setup a LeapServ on virtual machines will greatly expand the implementation and deployment options available to our customers. We have created a system to custom build LeapServ software to specific customer needs, which will enable us to support a wide range of VMware environments. We are excited to offer this new option and to see the innovative ways it will be put to use.”

One of the major benefits to the LeapServVM is that its core backup methodology is agent-less, allowing users to backup data from virtually all systems through standard network protocols. The LeapServVM product can also be beneficial when customers would like to phase in or evaluate offsite data backup technology from BitLeap.

The LeapServVM software license and file creation fee for up to 500 gigabytes of backup storage is $500 and for up to 1 terabyte of backup storage is $750.

[Source: MarketWatch]

Cisco’s John McCool Talks Virtualization

July 11, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

NetworkWorld published a great interview yesterday with John McCool, senior VP of data center, switching and security at Cisco. McCool sees a great future for virtualization around the company’s most successful product in its entire history, the Catalyst 6500 (and its successor, the Nexus 7000 Series, which was recently unveiled), combined with its own forray into virtualizing the data center with its Data Center 3.0 initiative.

A small excerpt:

What other areas are investment priorities?

Virtualizing services in the branch by centralizing those services in the data center. That’s a trend that’s here to stay. [Application Control Engine] and applications embedded into the network infrastructure would be another area that we’ll continue to drive very heavily.

Do you plan to take virtualization above the network to the server or application level?

You see a component of that already in Unified I/O. So the I/O component, really virtualizing that over a single connection to the network, is very fundamental. And then being able to split that out further in the networking device. That’s getting ingrained in the architecture of the data center, very much touching the connection to the server itself.

Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.

Read the rest of the interview here.

[Source: Cisco Blogs]

Cisco Systems

Clusterscale Releases ClusterLoad ESX, Virtual Appliance for Traffic Management and Load Balancing

July 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

ClusterScale, provider of load balancing, open source, traffic management and database clustering appliances, today announced (PDF) the launch of its new virtual appliance, ClusterLoad ESX Virtual Appliance.

ClusterLoad ESX VA offers all the functionality of its hardware counterparts, while lowering demands on the data center, with the added environmental benefits that come with this. The virtual appliance manages application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load balances them across the application infrastructure. The product has passed VMware’s VA Certification program. The product has additional management tools to make installation and configuration quick and easy.

ClusterLoad ESX VA allows you to package a fully configured and optimised software stack in a virtual server format that can be quickly deployed on top of VMware ESX. The software is simple to install on Windows, Mac and Linux and does not have any adverse effects on the host operating system, providing greater flexibility and maximum system utilisation by consolidating multiple environments into a single server, workstation, or PC.

With fewer systems required for the same tasks, ClusterLoad ESX VA claims it delivers:

Simplified resource management increasing IT efficiency.
Decreased disaster recovery time.
Greater systems reliability and availability reducing corporate risk and real-time losses from downtime.
Lower hardware acquisition costs with increased utilisation of the machines you already have.

ClusterLoad ESX VA runs on true 64 bit processors with a VT (Virtualisation Technology) extension and is fully optimised for VMware ESX and VMware Server.

Prices for the product start from £3,995 for a single virtual appliance and £5,595 for the pair.

[Source: VMblog]

Clusterscale

Goldman Sachs Predicts IT Spending Downturn, Virtualization Uprise

July 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Goldman Sachs predicts IT spending will slip from 7 % growth to 5 % growth in 2008. Not a downturn of catastrophic proportions, but still bad news for the industry. On the upside, server virtualization and server consolidation were ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in terms of spending priorities for this and next year. No. 3 was cost-cutting in general, followed by grid computing and on-demand computing finishing the priorities list.

Expectations of budget growth remain down significantly on a year-over-year basis, with many CIOs limiting their purchases to projects with a high and fast ROI. We continue to believe that 2008 IT spending will decelerate to 5 percent from 7 percent in 2007….Demand for discretionary IT projects dropped to its lowest point in the history of our survey, with caution beginning to spread to the offshore providers. CIOs have emphasized to us that they are buying on a need versus want basis, are often downsizing deals to fit with current budget constraints…. In fact, contrary to general tightening in spending, purchases with an especially compelling ROI are being accelerated in the current environment.

[For more on the report, including graphics: The Open Road]