virtualisation

Hyperformix Snags $3.8 Million More to Spur Growth in Virtualization Capacity Planning

March 3, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hyperformix, provider of solutions for IT capacity and performance, today announced that it has secured a new round of equity and debt funding totaling $3.8 million. The funding will be used to drive accelerated growth and market penetration for its solutions aimed at the virtualization market. New investor LTI joins existing investors M/C Venture Partners and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners for the round.

Hyperformix will use the funds to expand engineering, marketing and sales of its IT capacity and performance solutions for virtualized environments.

The increasing importance of virtualization management in large scale IT shops has revitalized the market for IT capacity planning. According to Peter Klante, Hyperformix President and CEO, this funding will allow Hyperformix to solidify and accelerate its leadership position in this new and exciting market.

Hyperformix software’s advanced techniques produce accurate predictions of performance and capacity of key applications and deliver actionable insights through compelling interactive dashboards. Hyperformix can automatically assess the current health of IT systems and predict near- and long-term capacity and performance issues. Hyperformix solutions can be used in planning phases for IT changes, in test environments and to manage production environments.

DEMO 09 Launch: AppZero, Formerly Known As Trigence

March 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AppZero (formerly Trigence) is launching today at the DEMO 09 Conference a set of tools for creating Virtual Application Appliances (VAAs). This new approach to provisioning and deploying applications on physical or virtual servers running anywhere, is designed for the cloud environment and for movement of server applications — datacenter to cloud, hosting environment, or cloud to cloud. VAAs package a server application with all of its dependencies, but no operating system component (zero OS).

AppZero’s first public demonstration of its VAA technology will show a live production application provisioned in seconds to on an Amazon EC2 cloud, and moved in less than one minute to a GoGrid cloud computing environment.

Designed for instant server-based application provisioning and deployment, VAAs enable an application to run wherever the business requires without the burdensome licensing issues that inclusion of an operating system (OS) introduces – VAAs contain zero OS. AppZero VAAs work with mission-critical applications across all tiers: web servers, application servers and database servers. Enterprise middleware from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Open Source servers like MySQL as well as in-house developed applications can all be easily transformed into VAAs without changing a single line of code.

Cloud providers, integrators, ISVs and IT professionals find AppZero’s wizard-based tools simple to use for creating VAAs and provisioning them on servers at the click of a mouse. This instant provisioning allows scalable resources to be used on a pay-per-use basis, without cloud lock-in.

AppZero software creates, maintains, and administers VAAs. The key enabler of AppZero’s VAA toolset is isolation and encapsulation technology created at Trigence, an early developer of multi-platform datacenter virtualization technology. Under its new name, AppZero, the company is focused on extending the proven concept of virtual appliances to server applications. AppZero is led by CEO Greg O’Connor, who was previously the founder of Sonic Software (acquired by Progress Software NASDAQ: PRGS) and pioneer of the Enterprise Service Bus, the foundation of Service-Oriented Architecture.

AppZero VAAs encapsulate applications at a level above the operating system, turning server applications into discrete objects that run protected from other applications and the underlying operating systems. In a virtual environment such as VMware, Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V, AppZero drives higher server consolidation ratios by provisioning applications to virtual machines (VM) with almost no overhead. VAAs significantly reduces VM sprawl and dramatically speeds the time to get an application up and running. AppZero VAAs also simplify the use of existing configuration and server provisioning solutions, such as HP-Opsware and BMC’s Bladelogic, allowing these systems to manage server applications as discrete objects.
AppZero’s VAA toolset runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux and includes three tools: the AppZero Creator for building a VAA; the AppZero Director, a run time system; and AppZero Administrator for administering a VAA. AppZero has made available a library of single-click server based VAAs for free download at vaa.appzero.com. The VAA toolset is available immediately via the website and is priced from $500 per VAA.

Hyper9 Raises $8 Million Series B Round, Mike Maples Joins Its Board

March 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Hyper9 has raised $8 million in a series B funding round led by Venrock, a highly respected venture capital firm. Joining Venrock were current investors Matrix Partners, Silverton Partners and Maples Investments.

Hyper9’s new breed of virtualization management technology provides virtual infrastructure administrators with the visibility they need to effectively do their job as well as provide the control that is necessary to manage such a dynamic environment. The Hyper9 product will be generally available early March, 2009.

The company also announced that Mike Maples Sr., a private investor and tech industry veteran, joined its Board of Directors. Formerly Executive Vice President of the Worldwide Products Group for Microsoft, Maples has a proven track record in advising software companies as they expand product lines and enhance business operations such as sales and marketing. Prior to Microsoft, Maples held senior positions at other market leading companies such as IBM, Lexmark, NetIQ, and Sonic restaurants.

Racemi Introduces New Versions Of DynaCenter Software

March 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Racemi recently announced new versions of its DynaCenter data center automation software specifically built for rapid server recovery, disaster recovery and server consolidation implementations.

Racemi DynaCenter uses virtualization to automate the movement of server images, including operating systems, storage and network configurations and applications, to dissimilar hardware — reducing infrastructure costs along with the time and risk typically introduced by manual processes.

The new product offerings include:

DynaCenter RSR (Rapid Server Recovery), which enables rapid, automated recovery of failed systems to dissimilar hardware within a single data center for a faster return to service at a lower cost.
DynaCenter DR (Disaster Recovery), which improves business continuity by restoring critical operations quickly across multiple sites. The software automates recovery across multiple locations in circumstances where it is too expensive to have redundant equipment for e-mail, web servers, and other systems.
DynaCenter DCC (Data Center Consolidation), which simplifies complicated data center consolidation and relocation efforts by automating the movement of entire business systems to dissimilar hardware.

The DynaCenter software compares the configurations of the source and destination servers and reconfigures the necessary components and device drivers “in-flight” to ensure that the image can be run on the new hardware. Systems supported include AIX, Solaris (Sparc and x86), Windows, Linux and VMware.

Cloud Company Zimory Adds Support For VMware ESX Server

March 2, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Deutsche Telekom spinoff Zimory recently announced support for VMware’s ESX Server – extending the company’s advanced cloud technology to enterprise applications.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud combines existing virtual servers into a homogeneous, flexible, computing cloud – enabling data center managers to move applications quickly within single or multiple (on- and off-premises) locations. The technology enables very fast deployments of multiple virtual machines from an on- to an off-premises data center. Zimory now supports Xen and all flavors of VMWare.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud optimizes data centers by increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Zimory begins where server virtualization ends: Zimory combines virtual servers into a single homogeneous computing cloud. Depending on current resource requirements, users can move applications quickly within a data center as well as between various locations — the optimal choice to temporarily distribute workloads.

Zimory management solutions enable businesses to make server resources available to other internal departments — in a controlled way and a finite amount of time – and allow quantification of this utilization even at the application level.

Announced last month, Zimory Public Cloud provides companies of all sizes instant, easy and flexible access to external computing power worldwide while also enabling businesses with excess server capacity to offer their resources to businesses around the world.

Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server computing capacity from around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform. Using Zimory Public Cloud, companies looking for computing resources can buy capacity quickly — as needed — without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration and billing.

Savvis Aims To Deliver IT Infrastructure In The Cloud

February 13, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Savvis today unveiled Savvis Cloud Compute, a new virtual data center hosting and private cloud computing solution providing enterprises with an opportunity to cut costs without having to sacrifice security or performance.

With the introduction of an advanced customer portal, these new offerings feature enhanced user control and flexibility in provisioning virtual compute and storage capabilities on top of both private and shared platforms. This enables “right-sized computing” via the ability to purchase fractional compute resources on demand by the “instance” with flexible month-to-month business terms.

Savvis Cloud Compute provides essential benefits for enterprises that have substantial fluctuations in web traffic and computing requirements from heavy business day peaks. Immediate benefits are available for SaaS applications, seasonal web eCommerce traffic, and financial trading applications. In addition, Savvis Cloud Compute assists in the implementation of disaster recovery for back-office locations, and shifting test and development environments to lower cost footprints.

Savvis Cloud Compute inaugurates Savvis’ moving its utility compute and storage solutions into the cloud and marks the first in a series of new, integrated value-added IT solutions delivered in cloud technology that Savvis will roll out this year.

The News:

Savvis Cloud Compute delivers secure, enterprise-class cloud compute and storage functionality designed to meet customer requirements for on-demand, scalable, flexible and cost-effective managed hosting services for business-critical applications and infrastructure.
Businesses with seasonal or unpredictable computing needs will benefit from easy access to more efficient, low-cost, IT resources provisioned in near-real time, helping them maintain a competitive edge by limiting financial risk, keeping IT costs in check, and enabling speed to market. Customers can tap the benefits of cloud computing without significant initial investment and minimum commitments. This zero capital expenditure model appeals to customers that want to reduce their capital budgets without sacrificing IT growth in the long run.
Ideal for production and pre-production environments, Savvis Cloud Compute provides flexible infrastructure, delivering greater end-user control through the SavvisStation Portal to add servers and storage capacity automatically and in minutes. This combines with comprehensive capacity management reporting to help customers optimize their IT spend by anticipating and acting on changes in demand.

Savvis Cloud Compute operates seamlessly with other Savvis utility and dedicated services providing customers with the ability to map complex enterprise application needs to the most appropriate service enabling affordable, business-critical performance.