virtualization

Cisco Teams Up With QLogic to Offer End-to-End Virtualization Technology

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

QLogic today announced it has set up a partnership with Cisco to offer end-to-end virtualization technology, using Qlogic adapters that allow end-users to realize the benefits of quality of service capabilities in standards-based virtual fabric environments. Virtual fabrics provide storage administrators with an industry-standard method for improving storage area network or SAN security, scalability and performance by segmenting physical SANs into multiple virtual SANs.

Qlogic said its quality of service capability enables IT administrators to tie virtual machines to virtualized fabric environments such as Cisco VSANs using NPIV technology, which has been enabled in QLogic adapters since 2006.

Cisco Systems

VMware Creates GoVirtual.org, Community Site for Virtualization Academics and Researchers

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has created a new community site specifically for virtualization researchers and academics, dubbed GoVirtual.org. The website contains technical papers, courseware, software, and other tools needed to facilitate global knowledge-sharing around the topic of virtualization.

According to VMware, the new community site is intended to provide research and instruction on virtualization-related topics by enabling the sharing of ideas, results, materials, and tools among its members. The site is described as a comprehensive resource and knowledge base where members of academia can go to find the latest research and interact with leading researchers.

The community supports blogs and discussion forums for members to communicate with each other. It also provides a list of academic- and research-oriented virtualization conferences. To help educators and students with their virtualization research projects, the site includes a download section with source code and software tools. And it also includes a collection of several technical papers as well as freely available courseware. The 25 free courses currently being made available include concepts such as the basics of virtualization, interpretation and binary translation, I/O architectures of virtualization, and binary optimization.

Universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL), Georgia Tech, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and University of California at Berkeley are said to be already benefiting from the VMware Academic Program.

VMware

Compellent Technologies Introduces Live Volume for Business Continuity Automation

October 13, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Compellent Technologies today announced it will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume.

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent‘s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

Based on Compellent‘s Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

Compellent‘s Live Volume integrates with the industry‘s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company‘s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch.

Alternative Technology Launches Suite of Virtualization Protections Solutions with Double-Take Software

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Alternative Technology, an Arrow Electronics company is launching a suite of virtualization protections solutions with Double-Take Software, an infrastructure software company.

Alternative Technology will leverage its virtualization presence in the North American channel and its education and technical resources to offer a host of Double-Take Software solutions, including Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant, Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure and Double-Take Livewire.

Industry Moves: Promotions at Quest Software

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

After announcing that its board of directors has authorized a modified “Dutch auction” tender offer to repurchase between $135 million and $400 million of its common stock, Quest Software has announced some promotions as well.

The company has appointed Doug Garn as the company’s chief executive officer. Garn, who was also appointed to the company’s board of directors, will continue in his role as president. As CEO and president, Garn will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of Quest. He joined Quest in 1998 and has served as the company’s president since February 2005. Prior to that, he served as Quest’s vice president of worldwide sales.

The company has also announced that Vinny Smith has been appointed to the newly created full-time position of executive chairman of the company’s board of directors. In this role, Smith will be responsible for leading the strategic direction of Quest. As executive chairman, Smith will play an active role in managing Quest’s product direction and will continue to be responsible for Quest’s corporate development strategy. Smith joined Quest as a director in 1995 and was appointed chief executive officer in 1997. In 1998, he was appointed chairman of Quest’s board of directors.

HP ProLiant Virtualization Blade Server To Be Equipped With Samsung Solid State Drives

October 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Samsung Electronics has announced that its 32 gigabyte (GB) and 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) have been selected, after extensive testing, for use in the HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. This represents the first time that an SSD has been qualified for use in a server optimized for virtualization. The server is the world’s first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines, and is designed for use in virtualized environments that require significant memory, data storage and network connections to optimize server performance.

By using SSDs instead of hard disk drives, HP is able to free up a significant amount of physical space which can then be allocated for additional DRAM capacity—further improving system performance. The BL495c has 16 DRAM sockets.

The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade eliminates performance bottlenecks in virtual machine hosts. Engineered with more memory and I/O than any other two-processor blade server, the new server has a maximum processor speed of 2.3 GHz and a maximum front-side bus speed of 1 GHz, according to HP, and comes with the option of two SATA SSD storage drives (either 32 or 64 GBs).

The Samsung single-level-cell (SLC) SSD has a (sequential) read speed of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and a (sequential) write speed of 80 MB/s. The SLC SSD’s power consumption is as little as a miniscule 0.5 watt (one-twentieth that of a conventional 15K enterprise rpm hard drive) in active mode and 0.1 watt in sleep mode.