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DataCore Goes After Eastern European Market, Partners With Prosper Intelligence

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DataCore Software and Prosper Intelligence have announced a distribution agreement for Austria and Eastern Europe. Prosper will resell and support SANmelody and SANsymphony™as the SAN and virtual storage component of its virtualization portfolio. Prosper will integrate both SAN software solutions into its showcase “Virtualization Consolidation Academy” (VCA) lab in Vienna.

The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is an innovative knowledge transfer and competence center, which focuses on helping partners and customers evaluate and train and understand virtualization and consolidation technologies. With the agreement, Prosper can provide an end-to-end virtualization portfolio – Total Enterprise Virtualization – to its partner base with the addition of DataCore’s advanced storage virtualization, fault-tolerant SAN and disaster recovery solutions. In addition, DataCore obtains a key distribution partnership with the ability to support and resell into the emerging and growing Eastern European market.

Prosper currently supports a growing base of resellers in Austria and Eastern Europe, who are implementing virtualization and consolidation projects for business-critical applications, servers and data storage. With today’s agreement, DataCore’s storage virtualization technology complements the existing portfolio of desktop, server and application virtualization with a hardware-independent, flexible and cost effective storage solution. The Virtualization Consolidation Academy is seen as an independent review platform that can be used to evaluate, test, train and showcase virtualization solutions and technologies.

DataCore’s virtualization platforms improve the utilization and performance of disk storage, enable a new level of flexibility and hardware independence and reduce the overall cost of storage area networking. With SANmelody, DataCore provides a cost-effective, feature rich SAN solution that includes automated storage management, high availability, disaster recovery and thin provisioning. SANsymphony is the enterprise solution that enables Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and meets the advanced needs of larger organizations in terms of capacity, performance and scalability.

VirtualLogix VLX Now Supports Symbian OS

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VirtualLogix today announced that its virtualization software product, VirtualLogix VLX, is the first to support Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced data-enabled mobile phones. VirtualLogix will demonstrate a prototype configuration of the Symbian OS running simultaneously with Linux on several mobile platforms at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, on 21-22 October 2008.

The first product to support Symbian OS on a virtualized mobile platform, VirtualLogix VLX provides new opportunities to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and semiconductor vendors to leverage the benefits of virtualization in their phone product designs. As a member of the Symbian Partner Network, VirtualLogix is committed to developing ground-breaking solutions based on the Symbian platform for the benefit of the mobile industry.
VirtualLogix VLX for mobile handsets separates hardware management and application management on mobile platforms, allowing an application running on the Symbian OS to access a peripheral device managed by another operating system kernel, such as Linux. With additional security for financial and other high-risk transactions, VirtualLogix VLX for Symbian permits handset manufacturers and wireless operators to deliver more reliable mobile phones with advanced features to the mass market.

KPIT Cummins and VaST Partner to Deliver Virtualization Tools and Services to Automotive Industry

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VaST, specialized in electronics virtualization, and KPIT Cummins Infosystems, product engineering partner to the Automotive industry, today announced a partnership to deliver electronic virtualization tools and specialized services to global automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers and ODMs. The combination of tools, software IP, and services accelerates cost reductions and quality improvement.

Increasingly automobiles are differentiated through software content and electronics, which requires improved methods for designing software rich systems. The partnership between VaST and KPIT Cummins focuses on methodology adoption services that speed the deployment of advanced virtual prototyping tools and methodologies such as networked ECU Virtual-Hardware-In-the-Loop simulations. Electronic virtualization is highly effective in reducing engineering costs while simultaneously enabling improved end-system software quality.
KPIT Cummins and VaST have individually proven their ability to deliver leading-edge solutions for software rich automotive systems. By collaborating they offer a total solution composed of VaST’s de facto standard automotive virtualization tools supported by all major semiconductor suppliers, and KPIT’s automotive software services, in-vehicle network software, software platforms and System engineering services proven with over 50+ automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and semiconductor suppliers globally.

VIRTERA Says It Gave Open Solutions A 165% ROI On Virtualization

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VIRTERA, a services and consulting firm that specializes in maximizing virtualization Return on Investment (ROI), announced today that Open Solutions, a provider of integrated technologies for financial services providers, has realized a nine-month, 165 percent return on investment from virtualizing their global data center.

Open Solutions turned to VIRTERA, which specializes in ensuring enterprise organizations’ successful and rapid adoption of multi-vendor virtualization technologies, while optimizing the return on their IT investment. Ryan Marsee, Director of Corporate Networking for Open Solutions and his team leveraged VIRTERA’s unique professional services and consulting methodology, vSpectrum, to streamline the company’s virtualization deployment and to ensure their many vendor technologies worked seamlessly together.

As a result of VIRTERA’s experience and expertise, Open Solutions’ server compression was dramatically reduced to a 14:1 ratio (140 servers supported by 10 hosts) with server utilization plummeting by more than 50 percent from its prior 98 percent capacity.

In addition, VIRTERA also virtualized a portion of Open Solutions’ desktops. Currently, Open Solutions’ bandwidth-intensive, offshore development efforts require up to 12 hours for moving data from the company’s Cherry Hill, NJ and Glastonbury, CT data centers. With VIRTERA’s help, offshore developers can now tap into both U.S. locations and access on-demand data.

VMware and Patent #6397242 Go Back About 10 Years

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Nice catch by Andrew Dugdell: it’s about 10 years ago that Scott Devine, Edouard Bugnion and Mendel Rosenblum filed patent #6397242, “Virtualization system including a virtual machine monitor for a Computer with segmented Architecture”.

Filing date: Oct 26, 1998
Issue date: May 28, 2002
Inventors: Scott W. Devine, Edouard Bugnion, Mendel Rosenblum
Assignees: VMWare, Inc.
Primary Examiner: Majid Banankhah
Attorney: Jeffrey Slusher
Application number: 9/179,137

Abstract
In a computer that has hardware processor, and a memory, the invention provides a virtual machine monitor (VMM) and a virtual machine (VM) that has at least one virtual processor and is operatively connected to the VMM for running a sequence of VM instructions, which are either directly executable or non-directly executable. The VMM includes both a binary translation sub-system and a direct execution sub-system, as well as a sub-system that determines if VM instructions must be executed using binary translation, or if they can be executed using direct execution. Shadow descriptor tables in the VMM, corresponding to VM descriptor tables, segment tracking and memory tracing are used as factors in the decision of which execution mode to activate. The invention is particularly well-adapted for virtualizing computers in which the hardware processor has an Intel x86 architecture.

rPath Introduces Cloud Computing Adoption Model

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rPath today announced its Cloud Computing Adoption Model, which defines a pragmatic, five-step approach for the graduated adoption of cloud computing. The Cloud Computing Adoption Model will be rolled out on October 23, as part of an rPath webinar featuring guests Amazon Web Services, Forrester Research and MomentumSI.

Cloud computing holds real promise for enterprises and SMBs, as well as the ISVs and individual developers serving them. Among other benefits, cloud computing can help organizations:

  • reduce capital and operating expenses by increasing infrastructure utilization and reducing server sprawl;
  • reduce the cost of software consumption by allowing business lines to consume application functionality on demand and to align cost with value received; and
  • dramatically improve business agility and responsiveness by compressing deployment cycles and time-to-value for application functionality.

To help organizations realize the promise and avoid the perils of cloud computing, the Cloud Computing Adoption Model provides a pragmatic, actionable, step-by-step framework for achieving measurable benefits now, while laying the foundation for the strategic benefits of a cloud infrastructure over time.

For each level, The Cloud Computing Adoption Model outlines strategic goals, investment requirements, expected returns, risk factors, and readiness criteria for advancement.