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Meru Networks Launches “Virtual Ports” For Wireless Network

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Meru Networks has brought the techniques of virtualization to the wireless world, enabling the optimization of radio frequency (RF) resources to bring wireless LAN performance and reliability level with wired networks, reducing the price of wireless networking to a fraction of its wired equivalent.

Meru’s established “virtual cell” WLAN architecture, first launched in 2003, puts all access points on a single radio channel. This benefits companies by reducing or eliminating the need for costly RF planning, while ensuring excellent quality of service for mobile users.

With today’s introduction of Meru’s new “virtual port” capability, every wireless client device accessing the WLAN (laptop, phone, PDA, scanner) gets its own unique identifier (BSSID) that stays with the device wherever it moves within the WLAN.

This lets enterprises control the WLAN resources that an individual client device gets – just as in a wired switched network – providing enterprises with the ability to predict the cost of managing, provisioning and growing the wireless network in the way they have managed servers, storage and wired network resources.
The increased control realized with virtual port technology is especially important as wireless becomes the primary edge technology for network connectivity in an increasing number of environments, and as new and diverse wireless devices, based on the high-performance 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, proliferate throughout the enterprise.

Virtual port technology is available with Meru’s System Director 3.6 software, which is available now. Meru customers with active support contracts can upgrade to virtual port capability at no charge.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

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As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.

IBM Adds VMware Technology To Lotus Foundations

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Looking to steal the limelight from this week’s official launch of Microsoft Essential Business Server, IBM Monday said it is adding VMware’s virtualization technology to its IBM Lotus Foundations hardware/software appliances, allowing customers to run Windows on the Linux-based appliances.

Lotus Foundations competes head-to-head with Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server. This week Microsoft is slated to begin shipping the new Windows Essential Business Server 2008, a pre-configured software bundle targeting mid-size companies with up to 250 PCs. It’s also expected to begin shipping Windows Small Business Server 2008, a new release of the popular package for small businesses.

IBM is adding the VMware hypervisor to the Lotus Foundations server, allowing customers to run Windows and Windows applications on the system. VMware for the Lotus Foundations servers is currently in beta testing. The Lotus Foundations servers run on an optimized version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with an operating system kernel that’s less than 100 Mbytes.

Replicate Technologies Leaves Stealth Mode

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Replicate Technologies is leaving stealth mode today with the launch of its first product, Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA). You can get a free trial here.

Their website says:

RDA enables datacenter administrators to prevent downtime by providing predictive fault identification and prescriptive guidance for fault resolution. Available as an OVF virtual appliance for VMWare Infrastructure 3, you can be up and running in less than 30 minutes.

Key features of RDA 1.0 include:

  • Active Discovery – which deploys virtual appliances to discover and model the combined virtual and physical datacenter systems, assessing the unified infrastructure for configuration fault issues using more than 20 pre-packaged analyses for datacenter security, resiliency and connectivity.
  • Predictive Analysis – which discovers and diagnoses latent issues in the unified datacenter using a catalog of Knowledge Modules that encode best practice and expert guidance for the resolution of identified faults.
  • Resolution Guidance – which delivers expert guidance, based on RDA’s Knowledge Modules, in the form of drill-down analysis which highlights the root problem, in order to quickly identify and prioritize important issues and expedite repair.
  • Knowledge Modules – which includes modules covering Ethernet which can prove security isolation and validate resiliency in physical and virtual environments; Host Configuration for service console firewall, iSCSI NIC and physical cabling; and, VM migration for maintenance mode, hot and cold migration and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) mobility. The catalog of Knowledge Modules will be continually expanded and updated.