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Univa UD Appoints New Management Team, Unveils New Data Center Automation Strategy

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Univa UD, a provider of data center automation and virtualization products, recently announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Brown joins Univa UD as VP and general manager of data center automation. Brown brings 20 years of experience and a wealth of enterprise software and data center strategy expertise to Univa UD. He joins the company from Dell, where he was the global leader in charge of developing Infrastructure Services solutions, most recently including Dell’s initial Virtualization and Data Center Power/Cooling offerings.

During his time at Dell, Brown also ran Asia-Pacific-Japan Consulting as well as his initial post at Dell leading Central United States Consulting. His previous firm, Plural, was acquired by Dell in 2002.

Also joining Univa UD is Kent Purdy, who will lead product development for the data center automation division. Purdy also brings more than 20 years experience in the business software industry, maintaining product focus specific to IT centric administration and management solutions for servers, distributed computing, and grid environments.

Purdy joins Univa UD from Altiris, where as senior product alliance manager he drove product strategy into partner roadmap and execution plans. At Altiris, Purdy managed Dell’s OpenManage product line, including Dell’s Client Manager for desktop and mobile management as well as their Dell Management Console server management platform. Purdy has also held lead product management positions at Platform Computing, Novell, and Citrix.

Univa UD at the same time officially launched its data center automation business, anchored by its Reliance product for service-level management of application delivery environments. Univa UD plans to release a major upgrade for Reliance in Q3 2008 including key partner integrations.

Real-Time Systems Releases New Hypervisor Software Version, Includes Windows XP Support

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Real-Time Systems recently announced the availability of the latest version of its Real-Time Hypervisor software. Available immediately, this software product enables the simultaneous running of multiple operating systems on multi-core processors, and now also supports Microsoft Windows XP.

To take advantage of multi-core CPU’s, more and more real-time software manufacturers have been forced to develop custom solutions. A few years ago, Real-Time Systems developed a software product to make it possible for embedded application engineers to run standard operating systems, both real-time and conventional, on Intel multi-core platforms.

Conventional hypervisors are generally implemented by interposing an additional software layer between an operating system and the CPU core that it uses. RTS claims this kind of solution often influences the deterministic behavior of the real-time system.

In contrast to that, the RTS Real-time Hypervisor makes it possible to run – simultaneously, independently and robustly – a number of standard (homogeneous or heterogeneous) operating systems on a single x-86 multi-core execution platform. According to the company, RTS software technology does not in the least interfere with any of the supported operating systems’ timing behavior.

By enabling the support of Microsoft Windows XP in the RTH Hypervisor environment, RTS says it has opened up an entirely new world of possibilities for innovative embedded systems. There are countless time-critical applications that would profit by simultaneously running both the real-time software and Windows-based man-machine interfaces on the same

Currently, the RTS Hypervisor supports Windows XP, Windows CE and Linux, as well as VxWorks, PharLab ETS and Microware OS-9. Support for additional operating systems is in progress. RTS Hypervisor, ver. 1.5, is available now. Version 2.0 is scheduled to be released in the fall.

ONStor Surveys Businesses, Claims Europe Lags US In Storage Virtualization Adoption

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Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe by provider of clustered NAS solutions, ONStor, indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in both regions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years. Only 27% of European respondents are actually implementing storage virtualization today compared to 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualized server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualized storage in their data centers. In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realize operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other results from the survey:

  • 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one to two years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%
  • Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualization solution. In Europe, the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

Respondents across both continents agree that as information continues to double year on year, storage virtualization is fast becoming a business imperative.

Qlusters Shuts Down

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Israel business site Globes Online got the scoop about Qlusters closing shop after seven years in business. The last 30 employees of the company were informed earlier this week of the company’s decision.

Qlusters, the company formerly behind the openQRM project shutters only about a year after it raised $10 million in a Series C round. While the market of Infrastructure Management tools and particularly Virtualization Management frameworks is growing, Qlusters failed to realize its goals and burned through approximately $34 million of capital.

As we reported earlier, Qlusters had no new roadmap after dropping the opensource openQRM project, which recently announced the beta of it’s 4.0 rewrite. It’s always sad to see a company like Qlusters leave the market like this, but fortunately their technology will continue to live on thanks to the open source community.

Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

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At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.

Virtualization.com, Now Also On Your Mobile

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Just a small announcement about the fact that your favourite resource on virtualization news can now also be checked on your cellphone, smartphone or PDA, at the request of several readers. Thanks to MoFuse, you can now bookmark Virtualization.com Mobile if you want to stay updated even when you’re on the road.

The exact URL for the mobile site is http://virtualization.mofuse.mobi

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