Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Our favorite comic hero Dilbert, created by Scott Adams , is summoned by his boss to deploy virtualization on the ‘Strip of the Day’ at Dilbert.com today. Further prove that virtualization is on its way of going mainstream, but at the same time the comic humorously illustrates it’s not an ‘out-of-the-box’ technology yet. It takes a bit more planning and experience to succesfully virtualize your infrastructure …
Update: there’s two three more!
After 3 years of supporting VMWare ESX Server in a staging and development environment, Verizon Business today announced it’s entering the virtualization space with a proper enterprise offering.
“Verizon Business is all about empowering our customers,” said Michael Marcellin, vice president of product marketing for Verizon Business. “With our newest virtualization option, customers can run leaner and meaner, while out-tasking the management of these complex environments. What’s more, this offering can even help companies to be ‘greener,’ which is a big plus in today’s eco-friendly business environment.”
In essence, Verizon Business is deploying a shared VMware Virtual Center management infrastructure to configure and operate this virtualized environment, enabling customers to take advantage of Verizon Business’ expertise and best practices in managing this technology.
Michael+Marcellin, Verizon, Verizon+Business, virtualisation, virtualization, vmware, VMWare+Virtual+Center
Trigence , another provider in application virtualization solutions, today announced a partnership with the Virtualization Consolidation Academy to utilize the academy’s facilities to make application virtualization technology visible and understandable to end-users. VCA evaluates different technologies and tests solutions for feasibility, compatibility, implementation and user-friendliness. Additionally, VCA trains partners and large enterprises throughout the region on virtualization technology and best practices.
The VCA is a new endeavor that includes many virtualization solutions that are proving the value of the virtual data center. VCA’s virtual data center is an initiative that presents the data center as a centrally managed service which virtualizes all hardware and software resources at the backend. Recent variations of the virtual data center model include grid, fabric, and utility computing. The ultimate goal in all variations is a cost effective solution with an uninterrupted quality-of-service.
“Our partnership with the Virtualization Consolidation Academy is further proof of our global commitment to provide the solutions data center managers need to get control of their applications in ways that simplify operations and require fewer resources,” said John Hamilton, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Trigence. “The European market is becoming an important focus for us, and we are excited to leverage all that the VCA has to offer to reach those companies in need of a comprehensive application virtualization solution for their data centers.”
Trigence claims companies around the world use them to:
— Manage and migrate Solaris, Linux and Windows applications throughout the data center
— Consolidate both Physical and Virtual server environments
— Do a better job of managing all applications throughout their lifecycle from development and delivery to maintenance and modernization
Trigence is different from hyper-visor and other virtualization technologies because it encapsulates the application at a level above the OS. The result is a completely virtualized environment where application capsules now have the freedom to be moved and managed without reconfiguration to either the application or the server.
To be watched!
Update: Tarry Singh has an interview with COO & EVP of Trigence, John Hamilton .
Technorati Tags:
Trigence, VCA, virtual+data+center, virtualisation, virtualization, Virtualization+Consolidation+Academy
UK-based virtualization company VirtenSys has secured a Series B funding round to the tune of € 8.1 million (USD 12 million). The syndicate consists of existing shareholders Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and the Belgian GIMV. VirtenSys will use the new funds to expand operations in the UK and US, and to launch its products and begin revenue generation.
“That the original investors subscribed fully to the Series B round is significant,” said Andy Roberts, chairman of the board of directors of VirtenSys. “It validates our strategy and demonstrates their confidence in the market opportunity and the demand for our products.”
VirtenSys is developing I/O virtualization solutions for data centers. VirtenSys’ technology enables data centers to better adapt to dynamic workloads, self-configure, and self-heal at a lower total cost of ownership and higher utilization than currently available systems.
VirtenSys predicts a growing demand for its solutions as workloads on data centers keep increasing and the dynamics of the IT workload are changing. According to the company these dynamics call for greater corporate agility in response to changing business conditions and require an IT infrastructure that can adapt equally fast. Organizations are trying to find new ways to increase data center utilization while reducing the total cost of ownership. This again requires greater dynamism in the management of the IT workload.
VirtenSys’ strategy is to protect IT investments with a standards-compliant migration path for servers to virtualized I/O resources. The I/O virtualization solutions are based on the industry-standard PCI Express I/O interface which is natively available on all servers.
Stuart Paterson, a partner at lead investor SEP said, “SEP is confident that VirtenSys has an excellent future. Virtualization is very much at the top of CIO agendas. VirtenSys virtualization solutions increase utilization, while lowering power and cooling requirements by as much as 50 percent. This is very attractive to many organizations seeking to optimize their data centers.”
Just recently, VirtenSys appointed a new CEO (Ahmet Houssein ), a new chairman (Andrew Roberts ), expanded its sales and engineering executive teams and opened its US headquarters in Oregon. The company was founded in December 2005 and raised its first round of funding in October 2006. Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and GIMV then invested a total of €9.5 million.
[Via Tornado-Insider ]
Technorati Tags:
Andy+Roberts, data+center+virtualization, finance, Funding, investment, Scottish+Equity+Partners, series+B, VirtenSys, virtualisation, virtualization
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, wrote a blog post based on the recent Sun quarter financial announcements. From the post:
“Topping the list was the interest in Sun xVM. xVM is our free, open source virtualization platform, which we unveiled at Oracle Open World, alongside our management platform, xVM Ops Center. xVM will virtualize Windows, Linux or Solaris, on either Dell, HP, IBM or Sun hardware. We’ve seen broad interest from across the world, especially from customers that want to avoid putting a proprietary virtualization technology at the base of large scale open source datacenters (“why go back?” one said to me). Interest in our virtualization story (from xVM to Solaris containers) expands to every industry, and nearly every customer – it’s just about the number one item on the agenda.”
Not sure about you, but reading xVM out loud (ex-VM, get it?) always makes me smile 🙂
I’m currently watching the live stream from DEMO 08 , listening to a pitch from StackSafe which is really compelling. The company was foreseeing enough to publish a press release in conjunction with the product launch.
“StackSafe, Inc., a provider of pre-production staging and testing solutions for IT operations teams, announced today the immediate availability of StackSafe™ Test Center . Test Center is the first virtualized staging and testing solution for IT Operations teams that improves availability and resiliency through enhanced software infrastructure testing. StackSafe’s solution directly addresses incomplete and ineffective IT Operations testing and analysis of changes to multi-tiered software infrastructure stacks.
“If IT Operations teams can test and certify changes to software infrastructures before they go live, then IT services become more available and resilient as well as more repeatable and better documented,” said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Comprehensive and efficient staging, testing and analysis are essential to achieving optimum levels of availability.””
Watch the Flash demo here .
These are the key benefits according to StackSafe:
* Reduces the uncertainty and downtime associated with IT changes, thus avoiding costly application and system failure
* Enables pre-production changes to be made safely before they are implemented into the live environment
* Helps IT Operations teams to understand the potential impacts that changes could have on their environment-before they impact production systems
* Enables IT Operations to be more responsive to dynamic and changing business process requirements
* Improves confidence in IT changes, while reducing the percentage of time spent on testing and staging-which can significantly lower IT operating costs