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Double-Take Improves Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Offerings

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Double-Take Software today announced the availability of the latest version of Double-Take for Windows product and enhancements to other products in the company’s suite including complete platform support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. Double-Take for Windows solves IT managers’ workload portability and availability challenges by making it easy to migrate physical workloads into virtual machines with minimal user downtime and to protect the uptime of critical workloads on physical and virtual machines by using real-time replication and failover.

Overview of the key enhancements to the Double-Take Software product suite:

  • Deeper support for the Windows Server 2008 operating system in Livewire, Cargo, and Double-Take for Windows including its Application Manager and full-server protection features.
  • Broader Capabilities for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008: In addition to its Double-Take for Hyper-V product, the company now offers a new version of the Double-Take for Windows Virtual Recovery Assistant. This new version enables migration of physical servers to Hyper-V virtual machines, reduces P2V migration downtime, and allows for migration between geographical locations in support of datacenter consolidations and moves. The Virtual Recovery Assistant can also be used to automate the protection of a workload running on a physical server with a virtualized workload at a disaster recovery site.
  • Double-Take Application Manager feature: New functionality includes enhancements to support for clustered SQL servers and full support for SQL Server 2008.
  • Double-Take Cargo: In addition to now supporting Windows Server 2008, the latest version of Double-Take Cargo includes new support clustered file servers, enabling IT administrators to archive file-based data and optimize storage in both standalone and clustered server configurations.

Rackable Unveils CloudRack C2

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Rackable Systems today announced the immediate availability of CloudRack C2, the first of many Rackable products to utilize Power XE – a cabinet-level power distribution technology designed to:

  • Virtually eliminate the data center “stranded power” problem (a data center’s power capacity which is paid for, but ultimately unused) and provides nearly perfect phase balancing
  • Significantly improve power delivery efficiency by converting incoming AC power to 99 percent efficient 12V DC power via hot-pluggable, N+1 redundant rectifiers
  • Eliminate server-level power supplies and cooling fans for improved reliability

Dramatic Thermal Efficiency

CloudRack C2 is thermally optimized to allow data centers to operate at much higher temperatures, up to 40° C (104° F). Benefits include:

  • Higher system temperature tolerance, which means significantly reduced power consumption by Computer Room Air Conditioning (CRAC) units, which in turn means radically reduced operating costs
  • Thermally-managed airflow via hot-swappable, easily-serviceable, cabinet-level N+1 redundant fan arrays for better enclosure reliability
  • Auto-adjustable fan speed based on ambient room temperature, resulting in more than 80 percent reduction of fan power compared to conventional AC enclosures

Build-to-Order Flexibility

CloudRack C2 comes in 24 inch wide cabinets, with 23U and 46U configurations, and is offered with server trays based on AMD Opteron™ processors and soon to launch next generation Intel Xeon processors (Nehalem) designed for better performance, energy efficiency and virtualization capabilities.

Video: Sun Open Cloud Announcement

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or if you’ve been completely distracted by the speculation about an impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM, you know Sun yesterday announced its Open Cloud Platform. In the 8-minute video below, found on DataCenterKnowledge, Lew Tucker (CTO Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms at Sun) outlines some of the details:

Video: vFace, H2A conversions or how to virtualize yourself with EyeBcom

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This post is slightly off our usual virtualization track, as it dwells into the emerging H2A conversion industry (Human-To-Avatar). Last week I attended the excellent Plugg event on innovation and entrepreneurship in Brussels  (which happens to be organized by our editor-in-chief Robin Wauters). Now that his annual event is over, you can enjoy more frequent posts over here again. Robin pointed me to a mysterious booth on his exhibition floor. Dirk Callaerts, the president of Eyetronics gave me a short explanation of their amazing virtualization technology. I even got myself virtualized in a similar way as Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Major movie stars use these scans to get their face applied to stand-ins and stunt men. But also because the insurance companies require them to get virtualized, so that expensive movies can be finished, in the unfortunate event something happens to the leading actors.

For those who do not live on a film set, there are many application for this technology too. Think about the gaming industry or online communities. This seems a fun booth to add to the next VMworld exhibitor floor, so scanned virtualization gurus can boost the likeliness of their avatar in the ‘virtual pavilion’ or on their blog. Another market for these scans is to produce miniature physical copies of your virtual self. V2P anybody?. The cosmetics industry already knows vanity is a great revenue driver…

Now that I got my face virtualized, I am able to send stand-ins for those dangerous tech interviews in the heated hypervisor battle fields around the world 🙂

Hyper9 Unveils Virtual Infrastucture Management Tool

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Hyper9 announced today the general availability of Hyper9, a product that leverages Internet and virtualization management technologies to manage change, configuration and performance issues in a modern, efficient way.

Built for VI administrators by VI administrators, Hyper9 is a simple, yet powerful enterprise-class product that is ideally suited for managing virtual server infrastructures. It enables monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting on virtual infrastructures like nothing else in the marketplace. It accomplishes this without agents, tree views, spreadsheets, or multiple tools.

Among the key product features are:

  • Search: Search across your entire virtual universe, from the hypervisor to inside the guest.
  • Alert & Monitor: Build queries to monitor your environment from inside the guest and across your virtual infrastructure. Set up alerts to track changes and keep on top of problem solving.
  • Compare: Analyze historical data about your virtual machines, such as how they’ve changed over time, with Hyper9 VMDNA™.
  • Report: Slice and dice data, generate performance charts and reports for management and colleagues.
  • Collaborate: Store and manage your searches, lists and reports and invite colleagues into your workspace.
Pricing for Hyper9 starts at $25 a month.

In addition to the Hyper9 product being made available at the web site, the H9Labs Search Plug-in for VI Client is also ready for download. This software was developed by a well known developer in the VMware community, Hyper9’s own Andrew Kutz, who was recently named a vExpert by VMware. H9Labs’ Search Plug-in gives the VMware VI Client 2.5 auto-complete search capability from inside the guest across your virtual infrastructure.

Skytap Taps $7 Million In Series B Financing

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Skytap today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.

Skytap’s rapidly growing list of customers utilize its cloud-based virtual lab solution to augment or replace dynamic, high cost IT environments such as those used for application development and testing, IT prototyping, product demonstrations and technical training. By allowing users to scale resources on-demand and pay only for time and resources utilized, customers can immediately reduce costs, increase productivity and improve responsiveness to business demands.

Since emerging from stealth less than one year ago, Skytap has achieved strong customer traction and third-party recognition for its innovative virtual lab offering.