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Platform Computing Debuts Software Product For Private Cloud Management

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Platform Computing today announced a new software product for managing private cloud environments from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Conference in New York City. Platform ISF is the first end-to-end cloud management product for enterprises to build and run their private clouds. It is the centerpiece of Platform’s cloud strategy and will be made available for beta in June with general availability planned for the Fall.

Platform Computing is expanding its product offerings to support the needs of mainstream business applications, leveraging its strong technology and experience in deploying large-scale shared compute environments. Platform ISF is computing infrastructure sharing software for private cloud management. Private clouds generally refer to resources pooled together in a shared IT infrastructure to run applications for business users. Platform ISF creates private clouds from physical and virtual resources, delivering application environments according to workload and resource scheduling policies. It incorporates Platform’s production-proven resource sharing technology (EGO) and virtual machine orchestrator (VMO) and includes capabilities for self-service, service-offering definition, contracts, reporting and billing. Private clouds deployed through Platform ISF allow IT departments to be more responsive to the needs of the enterprise by offering IT as services on a pay-per-use basis. This new computing paradigm is expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT as resource utilization levels increase due to resource sharing.

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. It also supports third-party system management tools for security and provisioning. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources while conforming to corporate standards. It does so while supporting

IT’s obligation to oversee corporate requirements, including governance, compliance, business continuity, and cost and risk management. While public clouds can offer infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most of the benefits of cloud computing are not realized by enterprises through the use of public clouds alone. Private clouds can leverage both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling resources into a unified environment and its value is independent of location or ownership of resources.

Oracle To Terminate Virtual Iron Business

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Oracle recently acquired Virtual Iron, even if it wasn’t exactly generating spectacularly good financial results (to put it midly). Now The Register claims Oracle is discontuining Virtual Iron’s business. More specifically, Oracle intends to “suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

Oracle aims to fully integrate Virtual Iron technology with Oracle VM, the company’s server virtualization and management product, although it has not specified when the new combined product will arrive. Former Virtual Iron people are also being laid off.

Full report at The Register.

Wind River Releases Its Own Type-1 Hypervisor

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Wind River today announced the immediate availability of Wind River Hypervisor, a key pillar of Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution for device development. Wind River Hypervisor is a high-performance Type-1 hypervisor, which supports virtualization on single and multicore processors. It provides integration with Wind River’s industry leading operating systems (VxWorks and Wind River Linux) and supports other operating systems. The Wind River Workbench development tools suite has been extended to support developing software that runs on the Wind River Hypervisor.

Wind River Hypervisor enables virtualization for devices across a broad range of market segments, including aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer devices, industrial, and networking. Within these markets, embedded developers are adopting hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems, and reduce complexity when integrating multicore processors. The benefits of using the Wind River Hypervisor include reduced hardware costs and power consumption, opportunity for innovation, and accelerated time-to-market.

Wind River makes it easier for customers to consolidate their systems and adopt multicore technology in devices by using key features in Wind River Hypervisor, including:

  • Support for single and multicore processors;
  • Focus on real-time aspects such as performance, latency, determinism and minimal footprint;
  • Protection between operating systems and cores, including starting, stopping, reloading operating systems to increase reliability; and
  • Highly optimized silicon-specific hardware support.

The introduction of Wind River Hypervisor enhances Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution, which consists of three pillars:

  • Operating system choice including a high-performance integration with the industry’s leading real-time operating system VxWorks and commercial-grade Linux platform Wind River Linux, and the ability to integrate other operating systems into the same system;
  • A broad and flexible set of multicore software configurations with support for Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and supervised AMP, and virtualization; and
  • A unified development environment based on Wind River Workbench for configuring, building, diagnosing, and analyzing the software for hypervisor-based systems, including the VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems and the applications running on these operating systems.

Earlier this year, Wind River introduced VxWorks 6.7, which allows system designers to select the optimal multicore design configuration, AMP or SMP, to deliver next-generation devices with higher performance while maintaining or reducing power consumption. Now, Wind River Hypervisor enables systems designers to use a supervised AMP configuration that makes an AMP system easier to configure.

Separately, Wind River also announced today VxWorks MILS Platform 2.0, the latest addition to the industry-leading VxWorks product portfolio, which leverages Wind River Hypervisor technology to provide virtualization. The virtualization provided by the hypervisor, coupled with the security properties of the entire VxWorks MILS separation kernel, results in a MILS architecture designed to provide a high level of assurable security.

VMware And HP Enhance Partnership

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VMware announced that it signed an OEM agreement to integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter suite and is also working with HP on new datacenter management initiatives.

In addition, HP has integrated VMware ThinApp with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform. Both of these initiatives will help customers seamlessly and cost-effectively manage their physical and virtual datacenter and desktop initiatives. Today’s announcement expands on the companies’ existing strong relationship designed to provide customers with complete solutions that help them build and manage dynamic datacenters for delivering IT as a service.

In the first area of collaboration, VMware will OEM the HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software into the VMware vCenter management suite. VMware will integrate HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software as a virtual appliance into VMware vCenter ConfigControl in 2010 after ConfigControl becomes available to further enable customers to maintain visibility and ensure compliance of configuration states in their VMware vSphere 4 environments. A combined solution will give VMware vCenter administrators “single pane of glass” visualization of how business services running in VMware virtual machines map to the physical infrastructure. This will enable customers to simplify management of their heterogeneous infrastructures through comprehensive discovery and dependency mapping as well as automation of common management tasks including change detection, configuration updates, provisioning, patching, and enforcement of compliance and security policies.

VMware has also worked with HP to extend the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform to support VMware ThinApp. This enables customers to standardize on a single client management solution to publish, deploy, track and report on virtualized applications along with physical applications. Customers can use the distributed infrastructure and preconfigured templates available in HP Client Automation software to manage VMware ThinApp’s new management functionality, decreasing infrastructure requirements and simplifying overall manageability. Customers can also use reports generated by HP Client Automation software to track virtual and physical applications for tighter asset management.

As a result of this enhanced collaboration and co-development, the two companies plan to jointly develop go-to-market and sales programs that leverage both companies’ direct and channel sales forces.

VKernel Adds Support For VMware’s vSphere 4 Platform

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VKernel has announced that its complete product suite fully supports the VMware vSphere 4 platform. VKernel products complement vSphere 4 and deliver advanced capabilities and functionality to enhance performance of the virtual data center and achieve a faster return on investment.

The VKernel suite of virtual server health and optimization tools solve a number of critical data center challenges impacting IT staffs today. Delivered as a VMA (Virtual Management Appliance), VKernel software instantly deploys and is simple to use to maintain the health of the data center and optimize resource allocations — reducing operational and capital costs and delivering a superior ROI. VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere, and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XEN. The company’s current products include:

  • Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
  • Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
  • Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
  • SearchMyVM — free “Google–like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
  • CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
  • SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time–consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Release: VDIworks VideoOverIP 1.0

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VDIworks yesterday announced the release of its new high-speed connection protocol for virtual desktops, VideoOverIP 1.0. This release drastically improves the user experience delivered in a hosted virtual desktop model, while also allowing customers full freedom to choose their preferred client and host hardware.

While a variety of connection remoting protocols exist in the industry today, many are unsuited for multimedia playback, others are tied to specific Thinclients or server hardware and yet others have technical limitations related to the kinds of video they can accelerate. VideoOverIP is designed to overcome these challenges and provide an enhanced set of features to both the IT manager and the end-user.

Version 1.0 of VideoOverIP includes the following features:

1)   Multi-monitor support
2)   High degree of configurability to deal with network conditions; configurable audio buffers, configurable compression levels, GDI and mirror driver modes etc.
3)   Universal codec independent acceleration; Flash®, MPEG, DivX and all other kinds of animation and video are accelerated without any need for codecs on the Thinclient
4)   KVM and Audio redirection
5)   Support for Hypervisors; Microsoft Hyper-V®, VMware Virtual Server and VMware ESX
6)   Standalone mode and full integration with VDIworks VDP Management Platform and Connection Broker
7)   Support for embedded SKUs of Windows® for deployment on Thinclients
8)   Support for 1:1 operation; Server, Blade PC and legacy PC remoting is also supported without the use of Hypervisors

VideoOverIP is available immediately and supports Windows XPe clients, Windows XP hosts, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware Virtual Server and VMware ESX.