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Peak 10 Deploys VMware vSphere 4 Platform

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Peak 10 announced the deployment of VMware’s vSphere 4 platform as an enhancement to its virtualization services infrastructure.

vSphere 4 further enables Peak 10 customers to implement internal cloud computing environments with access to external cloud resources, while maintaining a high level of security and integrity.

The platform solidifies Peak 10’s end-to-end infrastructure, offering customers pools of virtualized resources that federate between on and off-premise environments on-demand and with ease. Both large and small organizations can achieve the primary benefits of cloud computing, as vSphere delivers high levels of application availability, lowered cost per application workload, and increased management tools.

Peak 10’s deployment of VMware’s vSphere 4 platform, provides its customers with enhanced physical features for operational efficiency including twice as many virtual processors per virtual machine (VM), four times the memory, three-times increase in network throughput, and additional SAN tiers available for high-end databases. In addition, Peak 10 private cloud customers will be able to utilize vSphere upgrade checks, virtualization health checks, capacity planning, dedicated resource pools, integrated VirtualDR services, dedicated and managed clusters, and hosted VMs.

Peak 10’s managed IT and data center services improve performance, reliability, lower costs and maximize internal resources for customers while keeping their valuable information technology assets close to the business. The company combines its secure, private network and enterprise-class data centers with world-class engineering and support to serve market-leading companies nationwide. As a managed services leader, Peak 10 offers a wide range of technology services including virtualization, full service hosting, and cloud-based services in a cost-efficient and reliable platform for its customers.

Terremark Debuts vCloud Express Service

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Terremark recently announced the addition of the vCloud Express service to its suite of VMware Virtualized offerings.

vCloud Express is a new class of service based on VMware’s powerful virtualization platform that allows software developers and other users to easily access computing resources in a pay-as-you-go model. vCloud Express will provide customers with flexible computing on demand, with the power and control to configure resources as needed. It uniquely offers users compatibility with their internal datacenters, as well as Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud offering, enabling users to move applications to the production environment of their choice.

Customers will be able to easily sign up for the service online with a credit card and immediately begin provisioning computing capacity using Terremark’s intuitive Web console. Integrated firewalls, load balancing and network management features allow users to easily customize their cloud environment to their specific needs. Users will also be able to access their cloud computing environments via the VMware vCloud™ API, enabling interoperability across internal and external clouds. A Terremark vCloud Express community website featuring expert blogs, support forums and product documentation will provide customers with an interactive platform to receive up-to-date information and insights from Terremark’s team of cloud computing experts.

With the addition of vCloud Express, Terremark is expanding its suite of industry-leading infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. These solutions will leverage VMware’s robust and advanced enterprise-class platform and Terremark’s top-tier, massively connected datacenter facilities to deliver high-performance cloud computing services to the developer market.

Terremark’s strategic move into the cloud computing market began with the June 2008 launch of the Enterprise Cloud, a highly reliable and secure platform with the power to dynamically provision computing resources for mission-critical applications. Designed to meet the high security and regulatory standards of large enterprises and Federal government agencies, the Enterprise Cloud leverages a full suite of managed security services and unique “burst” option to offer customers a highly secure and elastic platform to meet their IT infrastructure needs.

Terremark’s vCloud Express will initially be launched in a limited-availability beta program, with a full launch scheduled by the end of 2009.

The SCO Group Offers Free 1-Year Subscription on New Virtualized Version

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The SCO Group today announced that it is offering a free one-year subscription with the purchase of its new OpenServer 5.0.7V virtualized version of the UNIX operating system. The licensing promotion is available until October 2, 2009.

SCO’s new OpenServer 5.0.7V is a virtualized version of its popular UNIX operating system that is optimized for the VMware environment. OpenServer5.0.7V gives customers a familiar environment while increasing the power and
efficiency of a virtualized infrastructure and extending the life of existing OpenServer applications to run on modern hardware.

OpenServer 5.0.7V is offered as an Enterprise Edition and is licensed under an annual subscription model; however the subscription fee for the first yearwill be waived with this special promotion for all purchases made through October 2, 2009. OpenServer 5.0.7V requires the installation of a time-limited subscription license available from SCO resellers.

VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

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VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.

Zoho Partners with VMware to Bring Private Cloud Software-as-a-Service Solutions To Enterprise Customers

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Zoho today announced a relationship with VMware designed to give customers a streamlined approach to running Zoho applications in their own data centers, leveraging the industry-leading VMware platform, which has been adopted by thousands of customers.

For enterprises that want to run Zoho online applications on-site, Zoho historically delivered its applications as appliances, via racks of servers that were exact replicas of the hardware running in Zoho data centers. The rack solution, however, forced companies to use Zoho’s unique hardware configuration if they wanted to run Zoho on-site.

The VMware platform will minimize the hardware limitations of the Zoho rack, while increasing the availability, resilience and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure. Customers who want their Zoho applications to execute locally will have the choice of running Zoho applications on their internal cloud based on VMware vSphere 4, which runs on a broad range of hardware and is widely deployed in enterprises today.

The VMware relationship will give enterprises an improved approach for running Zoho on-site as an internal cloud and keeping their data behind the firewall, which has been a concern of customers. Zoho applications can also be integrated with a company’s existing applications. Users get the best of both worlds — data stays in-house, and cloud applications are deployed with complete control.