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Evergrid Rebrands To Librato, Releases Load Manager 2.0

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Evergrid recently announced the company changed its name to Librato. The new name encompasses the expanded scope of the company’s product offerings which now includes application workload
management in addition to grid computing products.

Founded in 2005, Librato first developed a unique technology for lightweight, transparent checkpoint/restart and migration capabilities, for high performance grid computing environments. This technology required detailed knowledge of application structure and state. Leveraging this core technology and expertise, Librato expanded its product portfolio by adding an application workload management solution, Load Manager.

Yesterday, the company Librato released (PDF) Load Manager 2.0. The company claims Librato Load Manager is the only technology on the market to offer heterogeneous application workload management in x86 environments, and require no application or operating system modification. Load Manager enables more applications to run on fewer servers whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both. The new release adds support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 environments, and delivers new demand monitoring capabilities which provides users with a comprehensive view of application resource requirements for more accurate capacity planning.

Load Manager 2.0 broadens the product’s initial platform support for Linux to now include Windows Server 2003 and 2008. The new demand monitoring capability provides an advanced level of capacity planning that was unattainable until now. In addition to allocating system resources to an application and measuring actual resource consumption (load) over time, Load Manager can now also be used to project how much resource an application would have consumed (demand) had it not been limited by its allocation. This ability to determine the difference between load and demand provides IT organizations with a powerful tool for planning server capacity – enabling them to better meet application SLAs.

Load Manager 2.0 will be available December 1, 2008.

EverGrid

CA Wants A Piece Of The Virtualization Pie, Upgrades Data Center Automation Manager

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CA today announced a group of products aimed squarely at the new-world data center and its growing ranks of virtual machines. With today’s announcement, CA debuts Data Center Automation Manager 11.2, plus nine tools aimed at infrastructure, application performance and service management, as well as information governance.

CA’s Data Center Automation Manager tool seeks to minimize the amount of time IT spends caring for virtual machines, while improving agility and efficiency. It includes elements such as a rules-based policy engine and the ability to analyze performance measures and configuration details from apps and systems, while integrating with other CA tools including CA AutoSys Workload Automation, CA NSM, CA Service Desk, and CA Wily Introscope. The new products will all be available within a few weeks.

VMware, no stranger to the fact that customers want to use management tools from multiple vendors, introduced its plans for a Data Center OS at VMworld last month. The company envisions this OS as a layer into which other tools vendors can plug, using APIs.

HP takes a similar approach to CA’s, not making hypervisor technology itself like VMware or Microsoft, but offering hardware that makes sense for highly-virtualized data centers, as well as already-known management tools that can pull data from virtualized environments as well as physical ones. HP, with its acquisition of EDS also has a large services organization to help customers with virtualization projects.

Enomaly Unveils Elastic Computing Platform After Years of R&D

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Enomaly today announced Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), after having released an Alpha version in March of this year. ECP is an open source, programmable, cloud computing infrastructure for businesses looking to design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud. With its official product launch, Enomaly is shifting its business from a services organization to a software products and support company.

Enomaly’s ECP is designed to work alongside a company’s existing virtual data center providing time and money savings. An intuitive, browser-based dashboard makes it easy for IT personnel to efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing; and, analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity.

The Enomaly ECP is available for immediate download. Proprietary enterprise licenses of the software are available. With the release of the Enomaly ECP, the company is offering paid Web-based and phone support packages. The three plans are: Silver — Web-based support for up to 25 incidents per year; Gold — Phone and Web-based support for up to 50 incidents per year; and Platinum — Phone and Web-based support for up to 100 incidents per year plus assistance and advice with cluster architecture and virtual machine and application design.

Industry Moves: Kathryn Rose Joins Hyperic As CFO, Ron Oglesby Leaves Glasshouse for Dell

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Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic (earlier coverage) today announced it has named Kathryn Rose as chief financial officer (CFO). In this newly created position, Rose will be responsible for the company’s financial operations plan as well as being part of the executive team that sets strategic direction.

Rose brings nearly 20 years expertise in financial management and capital markets at both large public companies and smaller, privately held startups—much of that in the tech sector—to Hyperic. Her CFO-level roles include successful tenures at global consumer products company Leapfrog as well as at Autodesk, Sage Systems and Foresight Energy Company. She has also held high-level financial positions at Merrill Lynch and Chevron. Rose’s work ranges from raising $200 million in venture capital, to tight integration of financial and strategic functions across global enterprises to increase profitability.

Rose holds an MBA in finance from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BA from the University of Texas, Austin.

Glasshouse Technologies has lost its Director of Virtualization and Architecture Services, Ron Oglesby, after just one year. Oglesby co-authored two best seller books about VMware Infrastructure: VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide. Rumor has it Oglesby was hired by Dell.

Wachovia Analyst Downgrades Ratings for VMware (VMW)

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Wachovia’s Philip Rueppel this morning was the latest analyst to take a machete to his EPS estimates for the software sector, reducing numbers for most of the companies he follows.

“We are reducing estimats for a majority of companies in our universe, as we believe typical Q4 budget-flush will be muted this year, and growth prospects for new licenses next year will be muted,” he writes.

As part of his call, Rueppel downgrades his ratings on VMware (VMW) to Market Perform from Outperform, asserting that the company has “particularly acute issues due to their customer base segmentation, and/or growth expectations.”

In today’s trading VMware is down 67 cents, or 3%, to $21.90.

Marathon Enters Into Distribution Agreement with Ingram Micro

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Marathon Technologies, provider of high availability software for physical and virtual servers, today announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with the exclusive Citrix XenServer distributor in North America, Ingram Micro.

Under terms of the agreement, Ingram Micro will offer Marathon’s everRun high availability and disaster recovery software to its resellers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Included in the distribution agreement is Marathon’s everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization that is integrated with Citrix XenServer. Citrix XenServer is a dynamic virtualization software platform that virtualizes application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter as a flexible aggregated pool of computing resources. The combination of Citrix XenServer high-performance, easy-to-use virtualization hypervisor with the proven automated availability of Marathon’s everRun software, enables more organizations to deploy virtualization across a much broader array of applications.

Marathon’s everRun software is for IT professionals who want to prevent outages and data loss in their physical and virtual infrastructures. everRun provides fault-tolerant, high availability for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server to deliver uninterrupted availability, 100 percent data protection, and rapid recovery through a “one-click” operation. Unlike bolt-on failover, cluster, or data replication products that place the burden on the IT professional, everRun software is completely automated. It makes high availability and disaster recovery easy to manage and cost effective for both midsize companies and enterprises.