virtualization

Parascale Raises $11+ Million In Series A Funding For Linux Cloud Storage

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed an $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

According to the news release, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company’s PCS software is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance – without interruption in client access.

“With Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, we have the two premier investors in the storage space supporting our company,” said Sajai Krishnan, Parascale CEO. “In the very specific technology domain where Parascale operates , clustered storage, Charles River’s success with EqualLogic has been the best clustered SAN-storage exit. Menlo’s investment in Spinnaker Networks has been arguably the best clustered NAS-storage exit. It is an honor to have Bruce Sachs of Charles River and John Jarve of Menlo on our board. Their voting with their wallets in leading the Series A round, is an affirmation of Parascale’s team, business model and opportunity.”

[Source: ByteandSwitch]

Hyperic Launches CloudStatus, Cloud Management Software Deluxe

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

In an impressive effort to make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched CloudStatus.com, a web service (in beta) that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (which runs on the Xen hypervisor), Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service. Hyperic does so by sending a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, which obviously leads to a few questions about the viability of the service.

As Stacey Higginbotham puts it on GigaOm:

“It’s a decent idea, but my worry is 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.”

The Hyperic team also blogged about the release featuring a promotion video which we’re happy to share with you.

Breaking: Veeam Software Acquires nworks

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Veeam Software, known for virtualization management tools and its FastSCP file management freeware for VMware environments, has acquired nworks, a maker of “enterprise management connectors” that link VMware virtual infrastructure tools and enterprise systems management tools from Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

“Our customers have been asking to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures through a single console, and many of them have significant investments in HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager,” says Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO (also see our video interview with him at the latest VMworld Europe).

Veeam’s new lineup of product offerings will include backup, reporting and monitoring tools as well as Veeam Configurator, which manages VMware configurations from a Windows interface; nworks Smart Plug-In for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager, which incorporates VMware management into HP OpenView; and nworks Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which incorporates VMware management into Microsoft SCOM.

Embotics Releases V-Commander 2.0, Aims To Simplify Virtualization Lifecycle Management

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Embotics, which bills itself as a “Virtualization Lifecycle Management Company”, today released V-Commander 2.0 at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit 2008.

The new version of V-Commander reduces risks and costs by preventing virtual sprawl, automating lifecycle management and extending management systems for enterprise CIOs, CSOs, IT operations staff and security professionals. Learn more about the product in our video interviews with Jean-Marc Seguin, Chief Architect with Embotics (we’ve embedded the clip below) and the company’s founder and CEO, Jay Litkey.

V-Commander 2.0 aims to simplify virtual machine (VM) management within IT environments. Its features include:

Expanded Policy Capabilities – Increased capacity for new policies enables expanded zones and VM grouping, as well as additional policy actions for the different stages of the VM lifecycle.
Improved Reporting Capabilities – Facilitates unlimited custom reporting as well as task oriented reports that identify costs associated with expired, offline and unauthorized VMs.
Additional Enterprise Features – Provides easier installation and configuration workflow by enabling automatic VM identification tagging and the ability to associate and assign policies to groups as opposed to individual VMs.

[Source: BusinessWire]

DynamicOps Releases Virtual Resource Manager

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

DynamicOps, the recently launched venture-backed spinout of Credit Suisse, today formally released (PDF) Virtual Resource Manager, software that is designed to simplify, automate and accelerate the deployment and management of virtual machines to give companies true business agility.

According to the official statement, the software has been used in production for more than two years in four large-scale, complex data centers at Credit Suisse, managing thousands of virtual machines (VM).

Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) lets companies determine how to use physical and virtual compute assets, where to allocate resources, and what access to give to business units and individuals, all within a company’s corporate governance and compliance requirements.

VRM boasts proven scalability which meets the virtualization challenges of the most demanding enterprises. VRM’s open architecture works with virtualization tools and technologies from Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, and VMWare and is compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems and a host of other data center products already in use by many large companies.

“The unique self-service capability allows business lines to instantly provide new IT environments, and at the same time, allows central IT to maintain proper controls and policies,” explained Leslie Muller, the driving force behind the product development at Credit Suisse, and now CTO at DynamicOps. “VRM provisions servers, desktops, applications, and tools as a single package for our clients, providing faster access to custom environments and resources at a fraction of the cost. It also helps IT employees develop applications and products faster to increase company revenues.”

Introducing The Virtualization.com Job Board

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 5 Comments

Just a quick announcement to let you know the Virtualization.com Job Board is now up and running. For only $160, you can post a job offer which will be published on the board for 30 days. This offer provides you with the best possible return on your recruitment investment by targetting your open positions to the core audience instead of trying to hit a fly with a cannon.

Virtualization.com reaches thousands of professionals from the virtualization industry on a daily basis, from developers, engineers, system administrators, security officers and programmers to product, marketing & general management. Stop searching for the right candidates to fill your virtualization positions and start finding them!

Every two weeks, we’ll post published job offers in an article under the category ‘Jobs’, which will also be sent out to our e-mail newsletter subscribers. The 5 latest jobs will also be featured in the homepage sidebar.

For job seekers, the job board features a handy way of filtering outstanding job offers by occupation (consulting, development, marketing, etc.) and type (full-time, part-time, internship, etc.). Should there be no results for your query, the application will show jobs from other recruitment websites and portals, if available. The job board comes with a dedicated RSS feed you can subscribe to in your favorite feed reader.

The job board is powered by Job-A-Matic, a SimplyHired service.