virtualization

HP Wants To Power ‘Next Generation’ Data Center Transformation

March 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HP today announced ‘a set of products and services designed to help customers transform their data centers from a standalone collection of physical assets into a virtual and adaptive infrastructure designed to rapidly meet changing business needs’, which it dubs the next generation data center (NGDC).

From the press release:

HP is providing businesses with the technology tools and strategies needed to address top data center initiatives: energy efficiency, automation, virtualization, consolidation and business continuity.

Coupled with HP’s current systems, storage, software and services, the new products and services make up the HP Data Center Transformation portfolio, which helps enterprises to manage and transform their data centers.

“Today customers are facing multiple challenges – the explosion of data, a growing mobile workforce and the need for access to real-time information,” said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP. “HP is uniquely qualified to help CIOs dramatically change the way they create, manage and operate their data centers.”

HP infrastructure additions include new services, plus a powerful HP ProLiant server:

HP Critical Facilities services – As a result of its February acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, HP is expanding its Data Center Services offering with three new critical facilities services focused on consulting, design and assurance. The services help customers create scalable facilities that reduce the cost of data center operations through energy-efficient power and cooling technologies contained in space-efficient facilities.⁽²⁾

HP Data Center Consolidation services – These include design, transition and support services to help customers reduce the number of their facilities. As a result, customers reduce energy and operating costs while maintaining the ability to support business growth with a robust, flexible infrastructure.

HP Data Center Virtualization services – The HP virtualization portfolio has been enhanced with new design, support and education services that help customers create a virtual infrastructure from their physical technology assets. This includes virtualization across servers, storage, networks and applications.

HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server – The HP ProLiant DL785 G5 is a powerful and scalable eight-socket x86 server based on Quad-Core AMD® Opteron™ processor technology. The server is an ideal platform for virtualization due to its processing power, large memory footprint, storage capacity and expandable input/output. The DL785 improves server utilization by consolidating multiple servers and reduces the management, energy and space issues associated with server sprawl.

New software provides single view of physical and virtual world, enhanced automation:

HP Insight Dynamics – VSE – This is the industry’s first software to analyze and optimize physical and virtual resources in the same way. The software helps customers extend the life of their data centers with advanced energy-aware capacity planning. HP Insight Dynamics – VSE will support multi-vendor hypervisor technologies and can reduce costs of common data center tasks by as much as 40 percent. Previewed today and expected to be available in the second calendar quarter of 2008, HP Insight Dynamics – VSE seamlessly plugs into HP Systems Insight Manager, the world’s most popular platform management tool.

HP Operations Orchestration enhancements – New integrations extend comprehensive automation across all physical and virtual infrastructures. By automating manual and error-prone processes across clients, applications, servers, networks, and storage, these integrations help customers better manage and automate business services. Additionally, these enhancements help customers reduce labor costs, increase service availability and meet compliance requirements by providing auditable, standardized processes.

[Source: ZDnet Blogs]

Arrow ECS Launches V-PWR Program To Help NetApp Resellers Sell Virtualization

March 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) business of Arrow Electronics today launched “V-PWR”, a program to help its North American NetApp reseller partners capitalize on increasing demand for virtualization.

From the press release:

Through the V-PWR program, Arrow ECS provides education, training and tools to help NetApp partners pursue and close sales for virtualization solutions with their customers. Partners receive educational sales materials about virtualization challenges and solutions; onsite sales and technical training; personalized sales coaching; and marketing support, among other program services.

In addition, partners gain certification to resell virtualization software that complement NetApp(R) environments, such as VMware, distributed through Arrow subsidiary Alternative Technology Inc. NetApp virtualization accreditation is also available for partners that are seeking to increase profits by offering storage virtualization solutions.

Microsoft To CIOs: “Virtualization Is Too Expensive”

March 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

At the European CIO summit, Barbara Gordon, Microsoft’s EMEA VP for Enterprise Sales stated that Microsoft sees price as a differentiator in the virtualization market.

“What I hear is that users need to take out cost from their environments and virtualization is the credible approach. You have to ask if virtualization today is delivering cost effective value? And that it justifies the costs that are being charged?” She added, “Price is a differentiator. Existing players are quite expensive. Microsoft can add value to this market with a server play and an application play.”

Asked if the Microsoft Hyper V would have different versions that would offer different levels of functionality similar to those offered by VMware Gordon would not be drawn, according to Australian PC World.

“The time of individual point products is lessening. Our approach will be take a look at the environment, and make sure that the right virtualization functionality fits that environment. The fact is that it is the technologies that work well together and have good functionality that will let the user spend time adding value. So we’ve got a very broad offering.”

Martin Niemer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware (yes, also the one that said Dell would soon start shipping servers with VMware ESX Server 3i included free of charge, said:

“We’re not seeing any signs that customers don’t understand all of the issues associated to moving to virtualization. They understand that what it comes down to is that even the hyper visor is zero cost, which Hyper V won’t be, the question is how many virtual machines can you run on a server. If you can’t run that many you still have to run it on two servers and that doubles your cost. That’s really going to be the decision point. It depends on what users want. If you want basic partitioning you can buy a server with a Vmware ESX 3i integrated hyper visor or buy a foundation version of ESX. And if you want additional functionality such as high availability you can buy a slightly more expensive licence.”

Niemer said he didn’t foresee Vmware being forced to adjust its pricing when Hyper V came to market.

We’ll see.

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.

VMworld Europe 2008 in Video

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

At this year’s VMworld Europe in Cannes (France), Virtualization.com went wild and recorded dozens of videos featuring marketing, technical & product managers, executives, company founders and analysts from the virtualization industry. To recap of what our insomniac bloggers Tarry Singh and Nicolas ‘ Charbax‘ Charbonnier have been up to in Cannes, we’ve made a dedicated page with an overview of all the video interviews and booth tours.

Check out VMWorld Europe 2008 in Video

Enjoy!

Parallels Packages Virtuozzo Containers 4 Software With Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

March 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Parallels (formerly SWsoft) today announced availability of its Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 server virtualization software packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell. This provides customers with another choice for virtualization, which can effectively handle performance-sensitive workloads such as databases as well as support for servers using Itanium processors.

Parallels uses the standard distribution of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, an interoperable open platform for mission-critical computing, and adds its recently released version of virtualization software to deliver an integrated solution to customers.

From the press release:

“Customers can improve server utilization rates and realize the manageability benefits of containers-based virtualization in combination with one of the most popular enterprise-class Linux distributions in the world,” said Kurt Daniel, senior vice president of marketing and online, Parallels. “Importantly, we’re giving customers one place to turn for support with this integrated virtualization solution.”

“Novell remains committed to providing a variety of virtualization choices,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of product management for SUSE Linux Enterprise. “We view this solution as an opportunity to expand our customer base for SUSE Linux Enterprise.”