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CA Expands Offerings for Virtualized Data Centers and Private Clouds

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CA recently announced an new strategy for optimizing IT services by improving the management of next-generation virtualized data centers and private clouds. CA’s solution for unified business service assurance and automation will involve coupling comprehensive availability and performance management for VMware vSphere 4 environments and Cisco virtualized network switches.

CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model.

CA aims to reduce the complexity of managing fast-growing, dynamic virtual and physical environments by bringing a consistent user experience across end-to-end infrastructure management. Virtualization offers impressive server consolidation-related cost savings, and customers cite the need to reduce management complexities that result from disparate tools and fragmented teams. Moreover, to benefit from hybrid cloud architectures, enterprises and service providers have to enhance network performance visibility in context of server performance.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager’s support for VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 1000V will deliver patented event correlation and root cause analysis that reduces “noise” by suppressing symptomatic alarms. The products will also deliver patented “deviation-from-normal” proactive performance management of virtual environments that helps identify performance issues before users and services are impacted. In addition, they are designed to deliver live interactive reporting for troubleshooting, as well historical trend reports for capacity planning reports.

CA’s object model will include a consolidated hierarchical view of VMware vCenter Server hosts, VMware vSphere 4 hosts, data centers, clusters, resource pools, virtual switches and virtual machines, all integrated with the existing physical infrastructure. This model-based management, resource monitoring approach will help reduce costs and increase staff efficiency by correlating physical and virtual data across the infrastructure to speed time to problem identification and resolution.

An enhanced automated discovery of the integrated physical and virtual network and systems environment will minimize manual efforts and help ensure an accurate understanding of the virtualized infrastructure.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager will also detect and track VMware VMotion migrations, dynamically updating the object model to reflect the most current state of the infrastructure. This feature is designed to provide up-to-date and real-time views of the integrated physical and virtual infrastructure without manual intervention.

CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager’s patented Inductive Modeling Technology RCA is being extended to isolate faults to physical servers and intelligently suppress symptomatic alarms on virtual machines. This will deliver only actionable alerts to IT operations, while correlating symptomatic alarms to the root cause and identifying virtual entities impacted by physical infrastructure failures.

Customers will be able to gain even more business value by using CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager in conjunction with CA Spectrum Automation Manager, the core of CA’s powerful business-driven automation solution. The ability to utilize real time inputs from CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and CA eHealth Performance Manager to dynamically provision and de-provision physical and virtual assets will be instrumental in customers’ efforts to increase business agility, service quality and control, as well as reduce risk and human error, minimize costs, and improve IT efficiency.

Force10 Networks Unveils Exascale E-Series Switch / Router Family

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Force10 Networks today introduced the ExaScale E-Series family of switch/routers to meet the requirements of today’s virtualized data center and cloud computing environments. As enterprises transition to virtualized data centers and adopt cloud-based services, the network is increasingly required to be more dynamic and responsive to changing resource demands. The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is designed to deliver the performance, availability, resiliency and flexibility essential to power these new dynamic environments while significantly lowering total operating and management costs.

With support for the industry’s leading line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet densities, the Force10 ExaScale E-Series reduces capital costs and simplifies management to reduce ongoing operational expenses.

The ExaScale E-Series also extends Force10’s history of enabling cost-effective network ownership with an energy-saving, eco-efficient power and cooling design that provides the industry’s lowest power consumption per line-rate port. Patent-protected advances in backplane and chip design as well as custom designed power components reduce overall system power consumption and lower per port consumption by as much as 70 percent versus comparable competitive platforms.

Enabling Force10’s Virtualization Framework to Fuel Competitive Advantage
The ExaScale E-Series is the foundation for Force10’s Virtualization Framework and provides the multi-terabit platform required to power advanced data centers and cloud computing environments. As budgets have come under pressure, enterprises are turning to virtualization technologies that increase business critical application availability while lowering the total cost of IT infrastructure ownership.

Utilizing the management flexibility of the ExaScale E-Series, Force10’s virtual technology suite, including VirtualScale, VirtualControl and VirtualView, enterprises and service providers can build, manage and monitor network and application performance as well as automate business processes. These technologies enable organizations to build more agile virtualized environments that can dynamically respond to changing business requirements, increasing process efficiencies and fueling a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Force10 Virtualization Framework utilizes open, standards-based data center automation and orchestration technology to promote greater efficiency and agility within the data center. By integrating standards-based technology for real-time network traffic analysis and management, enterprises can maximize existing networking resources while building in the flexibility they require to rapidly respond to changing application requirements.

Force10 also partners with leading vendors to provide complete solutions that optimize data center infrastructure. For additional information on the Force10 data center partner ecosystem, please visit the company’s Technology Alliance Partner Program web page, including its computing alliance with IBM.

The ExaScale E-Series delivers an industry-leading total throughput of more than two billion packets per second across a switching fabric capacity of up to 3.5 Tbps or 250 Gbps full duplex per slot. Utilizing the capacity of the switching fabric, the ExaScale E-Series delivers continuous non-blocking, line-rate throughput that eliminates network bottlenecks, regardless of packet size or enabled features.

Leading Technology for Next Generation Environments
The Force10 ExaScale E-Series is purpose-built for demanding network environments, including:

  • Virtualized data center and cloud computing networks with multiple switching or routing domains in local or geographically disparate environments
  • High-performance computing networks with non-blocking and deterministic management and storage I/O requirements
  • High-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching and routing in high-performance Layer 2 and IP core or aggregation networks

The ExaScale E-Series also provides the key technologies and functionality to facilitate seamless interoperability for tomorrow’s converged fabric and MPLS-ready networks, including:

  • IPv4 unicast and multicast routing for advanced services networks
  • IPv6 ready for native and dual stack next-generation IP networks
  • MPLS ready with P router and VPN functionality
  • 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ready

The half-rack Force10 ExaScale E1200i chassis bundle starts at $89,000 and is available today.

Altor Networks Introduces Virtual Firewall, Integrates With ArcSight, Juniper, Mazu and VMware

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Altor Networks today announced the availability of the Altor VF (Virtual Firewall), and announced its certified integration with products from ArcSight, Juniper Networks, Mazu Networks and VMware.

The Altor VF is a software security appliance that runs in a virtualized environment and enforces security policy on a per virtual machine (VM) basis. Unlike existing firewalls designed for physical networks, the Altor VF virtual firewall can secure Live Migration – a technology designed to trigger automatic movement of VMs across physical servers, but capable of inadvertently moving an application to a less trusted network. The Altor VF was purpose-built for the virtual environment – enabling tighter security policy and greater ease-of-use than existing virtual firewalls adapted from their physical firewall counterparts.

The Altor VF extends the functionality of traditional firewalls. Traditional firewalls not only provide security to physical networks, they also provide visibility to the traffic running through them and export some of that data to 3rd party products to aggregate and correlate data across the network. However, traditional firewalls cannot see into the virtual environment. The Altor VF extends visibility into the virtual environment – providing NetFlow statistics, Sys Log, and other network statistics on a per application basis and exporting that data to 3rd party products such as those from ArcSight and Mazu Networks (Please see separate releases for details).

Similarly, in existing physical networks, some companies also employ an Intrusion Detection & Prevention System (IDS/IPS) to further secure their physical networks. Through its partnership with Juniper Networks, the Altor VF enables Juniper IDP appliances to extend their protection into the virtual environment (Please see separate releases for details).

The Altor VF brings to market a number of industry firsts to dramatically improve virtual network security management:

— VirtualCenter Integration — The Altor VF includes out-of-the-box integration with VMware’s VirtualCenter, enabling the automated deployment of virtual firewalls on ESX hosts. The product further applies a default policy to all new virtual machines — helping control virtual machine sprawl.

— Security Policy per Virtual Machine — VMs on a virtual server can serve different purposes — ranging from development and test to various types of production applications. The Altor VF locks down each VM to its specified use, insuring no communication among VMs with mixed application trust levels.

— Support for Live Migration — When VMotion moves a VM to a different physical host, the Altor VF ensures that its security policy and active sessions move along with it. Therefore, companies can obtain the full benefits of Live Migration while maintaining security within their virtual network.

The Altor VF is available immediately with prices ranging between $1,500 and $2,000 per server depending on volume.

Altor Networks

Cisco’s John McCool Talks Virtualization

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NetworkWorld published a great interview yesterday with John McCool, senior VP of data center, switching and security at Cisco. McCool sees a great future for virtualization around the company’s most successful product in its entire history, the Catalyst 6500 (and its successor, the Nexus 7000 Series, which was recently unveiled), combined with its own forray into virtualizing the data center with its Data Center 3.0 initiative.

A small excerpt:

What other areas are investment priorities?

Virtualizing services in the branch by centralizing those services in the data center. That’s a trend that’s here to stay. [Application Control Engine] and applications embedded into the network infrastructure would be another area that we’ll continue to drive very heavily.

Do you plan to take virtualization above the network to the server or application level?

You see a component of that already in Unified I/O. So the I/O component, really virtualizing that over a single connection to the network, is very fundamental. And then being able to split that out further in the networking device. That’s getting ingrained in the architecture of the data center, very much touching the connection to the server itself.

Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?

No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.

Read the rest of the interview here.

[Source: Cisco Blogs]

Cisco Systems

Cisco Talks Up Data Center 3.0 Initiative, Wants To “Demistify Virtualization”

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Cisco Systems today announced updates to several of its key products to accelerate applications in Data Center 3.0, Cisco’s vision for a virtualized data center tied together by a unified network fabric.

Cisco

Today’s announcements at Cisco Live also featured new tools and training to help networking professionals master the complexity of virtualized data centers. In essence, the company is rolling out a host of software and services designed to expand what data center administrators can do with virtualization.

“Real-time collaborative applications, energy concerns and the need to achieve greater efficiency from assets are driving IT managers to transform their data centers through new technologies,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Data Center, Switching and Services Group, and co-chair of the Cisco EcoBoard . “By providing virtualization technologies across the data center, Cisco aims to help businesses achieve the agility and resiliency they need to compete on a global scale.”

Where’s the beef, you ask?

The announcements coming out of Cisco include the release of the company’s WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) software version 4.1, which offers virtualized application hosting services, application acceleration and video deliver for branch offices, and Cisco’s VFrame Data Center release 1.2 for infrastructure provisioning with Cisco’s ACE (Application Control Engine) and VMware’s ESX Server software.

In addition, Cisco is releasing version 3.1 of ACE for the ACE 4710 application switch, which offers up to 4 gigabits-per-second of throughput. The company also is announcing the Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services for support customers and partners with data center deployments. Included in the services offerings is Cisco’s new Data Center Efficiency Program, part of the company’s Data Center Assurance Program 4.0, a Web-based tool that enables users to analyze power use in the data center and identify power and cooling technologies most useful in their facilities.

WAAS 4.1, VFrame 1.2 and the ACE Appliance will be available in the third quarter.

[Source: The Register]