virtualization

Industry Moves: Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa to VMLogix, Jason Langone to IGI

July 30, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMLogix, provider of virtual lab automation solutions, today announced that Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa have joined the company as VP of marketing and VP of worldwide sales, respectively. Pileski was most recently director of corporate marketing for Novell, which he joined with the acquisition of PlateSpin. Yanagawa was VP of inside sales for the EMC Software Division prior to the move.

Infinite Group announced that IGI has promoted Jason Langone to the newly-created position of Director of Virtualization Services. Prior to joining IGI, Mr. Langone held senior technical positions with Charles E. Smith, Citrix Systems, Tyco Healthcare, Computershare and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Amazon Loves CloudStatus, And We’ve Got The Proof on Video

July 29, 2008 by Toon Vanagt 2 Comments

At the O’Reilly Velocity conference we attended last month, Hyperic was there to hype the launch of Cloudstatus, which aspires to become the monitoring tool for cloud providers similar to what Netcraft is for’classic’ hosting providers. Get the lowdown on Hyperic and CloudStatus in this video (two parts) from Jon Travis (Principal Engineer) and Xavier Soltero (co-founder and CEO).

See part 1 of the movie here on Vimeo, but scroll down for the best part!

As we are living in the ice age of cloud computing, glitches (like the recent outage of Amazon S3) are to be expected and it must be said that Amazon managed to fix its ecosystem relatively fast and openly reported on the underlying problem .

An interesting question is posted by Reuven Cohen on his blog about the use of federated network protocols within cloud services and the gossip protocol that caused Amazon’s WS downtime on June 24.

“…We have been big fans of use of XMPP for federated communications within our Enomalism cloud platform for multi cloud communications (Wide Area Cloud). XMPP is interesting because it natively solves a number of federation problems within a tried and tested framework. One of the biggest benefits to the use of a gossip protocol lies in the the robust spread of information and the exponential nature of it’s sharing of information within a large number of machines…”

At Virtualization.com, we intend to report on cloud initiatives too, since all these Platform-as-a-Service providers (Google App Engine being the exception to this rule) are enabled by virtualization technology. We expect to see several more competitive statistical analysis tools for various cloud service providers to emerge in the near future. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) blazing the cloud trail, Hyperic picked them to start reporting on via CloudStatus. But Google App Engine and (Sales)force.com seem target platforms to follow. So Amazon’s trouble with being first, is they are first in line to be publicely reported on too. This also means the PR and sales people at Cloudstatus have a busy time issuing press releases and contacting impacted prospects whenever Amazon experiences a glitch or failure.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm ventilated the common fear that:

“… Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

Being curious and knowing Amazon only speaks through CEO Jeff Bezos or CTO Werner Vogels, we walked up to the latter and were happy to learn Amazon actually loves CloudStatus. He took a step back right afterwards, but why not just watch the video to see his response to the CloudStatus launch?

Amazon AWS Loves CloudStatus.com, Here’s The Proof (Hyperic Video 2/2) from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

On a sidenote: Hyperic’s newly launched CloudStatus detected the outage at 8:45am PDT, a full 20 minutes before Amazon posted that they were aware of the issue, at 9:05 PDT on http://status.aws.amazon.com/. CloudStatus saw several server errors coming from the majority of their S3 and SQS monitoring agents, in addition to other problems with EC2 (lots of EC2 zombies being created) that may have been related.

Like hurricane warning systems, while Hyperic CloudStatus could not have prevented the S3 outage, it was able to provide enough of a “storm” warning for users to take action. The company will be adding additional cloud services to CloudStatus in the coming months, next up is Google App Engine.

Hyperic

KACE Releases Virtual Appliance Enabling Remote OS Provisioning

July 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

KACE, a management appliance company we covered earlier this year, today announced the industry’s first virtual remote appliance to deliver remote operating system (OS) provisioning. As part of its KBOX family of appliances, the new KBOX Virtual Remote Appliance allows a central KBOX to extend full systems provisioning to remote offices, helping organizations to eliminate the cost and time associated with manual imaging approaches.

Consisting of an easy-to-deploy virtual appliance that resides in an organization’s remote offices, Virtual Remote Appliances work in conjunction with a central KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance to push out entire OS deployments to offices outside of a corporate network, oftentimes hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.

By automating machine provisioning at remote offices, KACE gives IT administrators a centralized way to execute deployment tasks, such as hardware independent network OS installation, disk imaging, software distribution, configuration management, and recovery at any location.

Virtual Remote Appliances allow the KBOX to provision systems in any remote office, including the ability to:

Provision from a centralized deployment library of operating systems, disk images, drivers, and applications;
Perform hardware independent network OS installation (scripted installation);
Deploy disk images;
Utilize a GUI-based pre-installation environment for the recovery of corrupted systems;
Deliver full reporting capabilities for system history, installation, and images.

Virtual Remote Appliances are available now and included at no additional cost with the purchase of a KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance.

KACE

Secerno Introduces Database Security Solution for Virtual Environments

July 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Database security provider Secerno today announced the availability of its Secerno.SQL database activity monitoring and blocking solution as a virtualized appliance on the VMware platform. This, according to the company, marks the first availability of its appliance-based database protection in a virtualized environment, allowing enterprises the same database protection afforded by hardware yet with the utilisation, management and cost benefits of a virtualized application.

Secerno’s virtualized database protection product is powered by its patent-pending SynoptiQ technology. The company chose VMware’s technology platform based on its penetration into more than 20,000 corporate customers.

“This unique announcement comes at an exciting time for Secerno. We have just secured funding that allows us to respond to market opportunities and customer demand,” said Steve Hurn, CEO of Secerno. “In this case, we are bringing Secerno to a virtualised environment to offer organisations more variety in their deployments and reduce their overall costs in terms of resources and expenses. Virtualisation is emerging as a key strategy for companies, and we are delighted to be the first to offer this option for database activity monitoring and blocking.”

Secerno.SQL for VMware is set to be available this quarter.

Secerno

IntervalZero Acquires Ardence Embedded Software Business From Citrix Systems

July 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IntervalZero, a new embedded software company led by a group of senior Ardence executives, today announced that it has acquired Ardence’s Embedded software business from Citrix.

The company, which is based in Waltham, MA, is headed by CEO Jeffrey D. Hibbard, an Ardence/Citrix executive with more than 20 years of software engineering, sales, marketing and management experience.

IntervalZero officially completed the acquisition on July 15 and will continue to market and sell the Embedded products under their existing names – RTX, ETS and Select. IntervalZero said worldwide Embedded Distribution/Reseller channels and Embedded Partner affiliations – notably the Partner relationships with Microsoft and Intel – remain in place.

Citrix, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, acquired Ardence’s Enterprise and Embedded software businesses in January 2007. Although Citrix determined that the Ardence Embedded products were not a good fit for its Enterprise product portfolio, Citrix made an equity investment in IntervalZero.

“We believe there are significant opportunities in Embedded technology, but it is not a core business for Citrix. To continue to grow and succeed, the Embedded business needed both the focus and the investment that Jeff and the IntervalZero team are fully committed to delivering. Their approach to the market and their business model are sound, which is why we have maintained a stake in the IntervalZero,” said Lou Shipley, VP and General Manager of Citrix’s Xen Products Group.

Xsigo Partners With Carahsoft to Bring I/O Virtualization to Government Agencies

July 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Carahsoft, a government IT solutions provider, today announced that it has expanded its VMware Complementary Solutions team to include Xsigo Systems, which specializes in I/O virtualization.

Xsigo Systems is the latest vendor to be added to Carahsoft’s VMware Complementary Solutions Team, which provides public-sector buyers with one-stop shopping for related technologies that address agencies’ virtualization needs across servers, desktops, applications, networks, and storage.

“As VMware’s master government aggregator, Carahsoft offers proven expertise in virtualization technologies and in marketing and selling to the public sector marketplace,” said Jon Toor, vice president of marketing at Xsigo. “We look forward to working with the Carahsoft team to bring our innovative I/O technology to bear on the challenges facing IT managers interested in deploying VMware software faster, on more servers, and across more applications.”