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Industry Moves: Siki Giunta New Fortisphere CEO

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Fortisphere has hired Siki Giunta as its new CEO, replacing Michael Harper at the helm of the Glenwood company.

Giunta joined the network virtualization firm a month ago. She was hired for her background at Managed Objects, a Northern Virginia firm bought by Novell last year.

Harper led Fortisphere to a $10 million first round of venture capital in 2008 from investors Fairhaven Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners, both of Boston. Giunta built Managed Objects from a pre-revenue startup 10 years ago to its $50 million sale, she said.

VKernel Introduces New Optimization Pack

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VKernel Corporation has announced the new VKernel Optimization Pack to help organizations achieve maximum ROI from their virtualization projects.

VKernel’s new Optimization Pack includes three powerful applets, Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory, that help users improve the efficiency of their virtual infrastructures. The new applets allow organizations to run more virtual machines (VMs) with the same hardware, maximize the utilization of infrastructure resources, reclaim terabytes of wasted storage, reduce VM sprawl and assure optimal VM performance.

A successful virtualization project balances proper resource allocations and utilizations with VM performance and cost per VM. With the Optimization Pack, VKernel enables organization to rapidly achieve their goals by providing a very affordable and simple-to-use toolset. Delivered as a virtual appliance, deployment is instant and users immediately begin solving their critical needs. The VKernel Optimization Pack includes three powerful management applets:

  • Wastefinder – quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
  • VM Rightsizer – a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
  • Inventory – automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.

VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V (later this year) as well as Citrix XEN Server. The company believes that a heterogeneous capacity management and optimization offering will be increasingly important as the enterprise virtual infrastructure becomes a mix of hypervisor platforms.

The VKernel Optimization Pack is currently available in a bundle with Capacity Analyzer 4.1 for $399 per CPU socket including the first year of maintenance and support. Subscription pricing is also offered at $179 annually per CPU socket including maintenance and support.

SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

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(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)

VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.  VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools.  In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers.  These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Wanova Leaves Stealth Mode With $13 Million In Series A Funding

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Wanova has exited stealth mode and launched a “new era in desktop virtualization” with $13 million in A-round funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Opus Capital.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, the company has launched an architecture called Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV), which addresses the need for enterprises to improve the management, support and protection of distributed endpoints.

Wanova’s new architecture is designed specifically to address the endpoint management challenges presented by distributed remote and mobile workers. The Wanova DDV solution centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience.

The founders of Wanova – Kessler and CTO, Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul – also co-founded Actona, which was acquired by Cisco and became the foundation for Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. Prior to founding Actona, Kessler was vice president and general manager for Qualcomm Israel and a research staff member at IBM in New York.

Ben-Shaul was the CTO of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco and led its technology and vision. Prior to Actona, he was a tenured faculty member at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he worked on wide area distributed systems.

Wanova is headquartered in San Jose, California with a development center in Netanya, Israel. The company’s solutions are currently in field testing with customers.

(via Venturebeat)

ParaScale Forecasts Cloud Storage Opportunities for Service Providers and Hosting Companies

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Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud. Google and Amazon popularized the concept, now businesses of all sizes and types are interested in its potential. With the availability of cloud storage-enabling solutions, many service providers and hosting companies are investigating new cloud storage service offerings.

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, a start-up company developing cloud storage software, believes the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed in the future. For service providers, this presents tremendous opportunity, as well as challenges.

Krishnan asserts that the public cloud storage service provider market is beginning to segment. Segment one includes the mass-market cloud service providers like Amazon S3, Google, Rackspace, and a few others. Segment two consists of the sophisticated enterprise cloud service providers who are rapidly creating new services that are combining virtualization, multi-tenant storage cloud and compute cloud service and private hosted clouds. Segment three is comprised of the giant telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.

“Most manage hosters and service providers will need to determine their strategy for winning business in the second segment of contenders,” said Krishnan. “While the cloud services market is going to provide upside for many years, service providers must have a well thought-out entry strategy to succeed. Surprisingly, a number of mid-sized new entrants are considering a “build and they will come” approach and launching into segment one. This is a recipe for a “build and you will get run-over” scenario, as the goliaths of segment one already have first mover advantage and tremendous economies of scale.”

Krishnan identifies several considerations for service providers and managed hosting companies as they develop their cloud storage services offering. These include:

  • Evaluate your customers and their data needs.
  • What amount of data do you intend to store for your customers?
  • What sustainable differentiator should you base your business on?
  • What cloud services are already available and how will you compete?
  • If you succeed, is the business and architecture going to scale?

Regardless of how the service provider answers the above business questions, the systematic approach to evaluate cloud storage technologies remains the same:

  • A cloud storage solution has three key parts. Research the options to ensure a full storage cloud solution.
  • Choose a cloud solution that can start small with a few TBs and scale up.
  • Avoid proprietary interfaces and APIs.
  • Determine if your preferred cloud storage solution can offer data access via familiar enterprise protocols.
  • Do you have an opportunity to offer differentiated cloud storage integrated application services? Can your cloud storage platform help you deliver this high value service?
  • Cloud is about scale. Ensure that your cloud data access protocol can scale as your business grows.
  • Always perform a proof of concept within your own environment.

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMware For Enterprise Computing Offering

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Rackspace Hosting, has announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualisation platform on private dedicated hardware environments.

Rackspace recognises the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualisation provides.