Virtualization.com
News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
Terremark today said VMWare would buy 4 million shares of newly issued stock at $5 apiece, or $20 million worth of stock in total, to acquire a 5 percent stake in the company.
Miami-based Terremark runs Internet exchanges and offers services such as data storage and operating systems management. Its shares rose 33 cents, or 7.4 percent, to close at $4.80. VMware shares gained 76 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $29.26 in the regular session, and lost 8 cents after hours.
(Source: Forbes)
Symantec‘s R&D engineers are working on a new virtual machine technology that is focused on protecting users from online attacks while surfing the Web. It works under the concept of setting up multiple virtual machines on a user’s physical machine. And then, it enables a user to perform operations of different security levels and different scenario based transactions in each of the different virtual machines. The so-called VIBES prototype puts a new spin on things to significantly improve browser security.
David Marshall got a sneak peek of VIBES at Symantec’s R&D labs, and you can read the rest of his report here.
Seanodes today announced first official customer shipments of its Storage Virtual Appliance, the Exanodes software for VMware environments.
Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) is ideal for designing high-end, clustered virtual iSCSI SANs that leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes. Users can configure shared virtual storage to maximize capacity, reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network storage. Exanodes VM Edition presents a compelling value for SMBs and hosted storage services such as cloud computing struggling to contain storage costs in VMware deployments without sacrificing availability or performance.
Installation, configuration and deployment of Exanodes VM Edition is simple and requires no additional hardware, no external SAN storage or fabrics, and no specific storage competencies. Thanks to a symmetric design where each ESX server participates in storage tasks, Exanodes gives VMs a large number of access points to the storage, I/O controllers and disks to ensure that every VM will get the performance it needs. Exanodes VM Edition is the only SVA inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, and resistant to bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. Its clustered design addresses known issues with centralized SVAs, either monoserver or dual-server with one server dedicated to high availability.
As businesses look for greener alternatives that reduce power consumption, capital and operating expenses, virtual infrastructures such as Exanodes VM edition can maximize the network’s wasted disk capacity, and eliminate the need for over-provisioned external RAID storage with its excessive space, power and cooling costs. Users enjoy the full benefits of server virtualization and can leverage VMware features such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware High Availability, and VMware Consolidated Backup without complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.
Exanodes VM Edition costs $950 per ESX server and is available now through solution providers in Seanodes’ worldwide network of channel partners.
We recently reported Oracle had acquired Virtual Iron, but now The NY Times has obtained financial documents that show Virtual Iron lost a heck of a lot of money in 2008:
“The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue.
Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million.
Last January, Virtual Iron raised $20 million, hiking its total funding up to $65 million. Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures all funded the company.
Oracle has declined to reveal how much it paid for Virtual Iron, but with the revenue in 2008 sitting so low, it seems pretty clear that the investors lost out on this start-up — that is, unless Oracle was willing to pay many, many times Virtual Iron’s revenue. (The company did report $17 million in cash and equivalents in 2008.)”
Ouch. Hard to get excited over this particular case of M&A, even in these troubled times.
Vizioncore yesterday announced that it is already able to support VMware vSphere, made generally available also yesterday by VMware.
The broad product set from Vizioncore including vFoglight (available now), vReplicator (available now), vOptimizer Pro (within 30 days) and its flagship backup and restore solution, vRanger Pro (within 45 days), will continue to extend VMware vSphere 4 and enable organizations to protect, monitor, optimize and automate VMware’s revolutionary new operating system for building an internal cloud.
VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4, delivered ahead of schedule and with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe.
VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform — VMware Infrastructure 3 — along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.
VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.
Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds — cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.
VMware vSphere 4 is available in six editions meeting the requirements, use cases and budgets of customers of all sizes from small businesses to the largest enterprises and government organizations. Prices start at $166 per processor for all in one virtualization solutions for small businesses and go up to VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor delivering features to transform the datacenter into an internal private cloud.