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Double-Take Announces New Licensing And Pricing Model for Virtual Systems

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Double-Take Software today announced a new pricing and licensing model for Double-Take for Virtual Systems that enables customers to simply and cost-effectively protect an unlimited number of virtual machines under one license. The new model makes it easy for customers to deploy disaster recovery solutions based on VMware vSphere 4 by licensing at the hypervisor level, versus the guest virtual machine level, ultimately enabling customers to reap the rewards of server virtualization while delivering a recovery framework that keeps workloads available at all times.

The new licensing model aligns Double-Take for Virtual Systems with the deployment of VMware virtualization and no longer forces end-users to track and count individual workloads. More importantly, the licensing model offers a user-friendly and competitive price/performance structure at a time when IT budgets are under increased pressure.

Double-Take for Virtual Systems provides complete data protection and disaster recovery for virtual machines. It offers full operational support for VMware vSphere 4. Additionally, all other Double-Take Software products support the VMware vSphere 4 release.

Veeam Software Introduces New Essentials Bundle, Acceleration Kits for VMware vSphere 4

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Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today introduced new product bundles designed to pair with VMware vSphere Essentials for small office deployments and with the VMware Acceleration Kits for organizations of all sizes just starting out with virtualization.

The new Veeam Essentials bundle, available for resellers to license alongside VMware Essentials, is ideal for small business or remote/branch office locations. It includes six sockets of:

  • Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Veeam Reporter
  • Veeam Monitor

Additionally, Veeam now offers four editions of the Veeam Acceleration Kit, designed to help organizations of any size getting started with virtualization. These kits are limited to one per customer site.

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard includes either six or eight sockets of:

  • Veeam Reporter Enterprise
  • Veeam Configurator
  • Veeam Monitor

The Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus includes either six or eight sockets of:

  • Veeam Backup & Replication
  • Veeam Reporter Enterprise
  • Veeam Configurator
  • Veeam Monitor

At the same time, Veeam introduced a new policy with respect to support for the free edition of VMware ESXi. “As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free,” said Ratmir Timashev, Veeam president and CEO. “One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the new Veeam Essentials bundle. This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing six sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, and this option includes Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter, for even greater customer value.

The new Veeam bundles are available immediately, with North American pricing beginning at $1,995 for six sockets of Veeam Essentials; $3,150 for six sockets of the Veeam Acceleration Kit Standard; and $4,620 for six sockets of Veeam Acceleration Kit Plus.

Diskeeper Debuts V-locity, A Virtual Platform Performance Optimizer

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Diskeeper Corporation has officially shipped V-locity, a new virtual platform performance optimizer designed to maximize server speeds on Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Already a VMware and Microsoft partner for its Diskeeper product line, the upward move to develop V-locity was made to create a virtual-specific product that not only performs defragmentation functions, but also synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems.

V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating VHD “bloat”. This is the wasted disk space that takes place when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. V-locity actually compacts the VHD, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT Managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

Diskeeper was the first ever defragmenter certified for Hyper-V, garnering notable praise from Microsoft* citing that “After independent testing, we found that Diskeeper’s automatic defragmenter not only exploits Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V capabilities but also is designed to meet mission-critical expectations in a virtualized environment.” Now V-locity has taken that technology to an all new level, bringing the first ever virtual platform performance optimizer to the enterprise.

V-locity consists of two components:

  • V-locity Host installed on Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V
  • V-locity Guest installed on Windows virtual machines

Desktone Virtual-D Platform for DaaS Gets An Upgrade

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Desktone today announced significant new capabilities for its Desktone Virtual-D Platform. The enhancements enable service providers to more easily and cost-effectively scale their Desktone-powered desktops as a service (DaaS) offerings, while helping end-customers quickly benefit from virtual desktops.

Desktone’s Virtual-D Platform enables organizations to quickly realize the cost and flexibility benefits of virtual desktop computing without upfront CAPEX investments. Uniquely designed along two tiers (service provider and enterprise), it lets enterprises keep their data secure within their own network, and maintain ownership and control over their Windows OS images, applications and all relating licensing, while outsourcing the physical data center infrastructure powering their virtual desktops to service providers.

The new Virtual-D Platform capabilities enable Desktone partners to efficiently scale and operate their services at attractive price points. They include:

  • Multi-tenancy: Exposes all the previously-existing, rich multi-tenancy capabilities of the underlying platform, making it easier to create, manage and monitor multiple customers on the same shared infrastructure. It is designed to support tenant isolation across hosted and on-premises infrastructure, including environments with stringent security requirements.
  • Multi-data center: Enables service providers to leverage their global data center footprint to support widely distributed enterprise environments and deliver high availability/disaster recovery offerings. Enterprises benefit from improved user experiences over internally implemented VDI, since virtual desktops can be closer to users, and from reliable, continuous service.
  • Virtual-D Service Center: A single management web console for service operators to create, manage and monitor many customers on common network, storage, and virtualization infrastructure.
  • Improved hosting economics: Giving service providers the ability to choose the virtual desktop building block technologies best suited to their business is a fundamental tenet of the Desktone platform. Service providers now have the option to use a VMware ESX or ESXi environment, with or without Virtual Center, to lower their operational costs.

Enterprise customers can take advantage of the following enhancements to the Virtual-D Platform:

  • Rapid service on-boarding: Enterprise administrators can easily upload virtual desktop images to their service provider’s infrastructure to accelerate DaaS implementations and time-to-value.
  • Global language support: Multi-national organizations can more easily leverage the Desktone Virtual-D Portal—a self-service, browser-based tool that allows end-users to access and manage their hosted virtual desktops. The portal now includes support for twelve languages.
  • Delegated Administration: Roles and permissions can be assigned at different levels to desktop administration, helpdesk and management staff, and—at the end-customer’s sole discretion—back to the service provider. All desktop management and desktop access remains under the end-customer’s user authentication authority (e.g., Active Directory).

Desktone-powered DaaS solutions are available through select Desktone service provider partners.

VMware Buys A Piece Of Terremark

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Terremark today said VMWare would buy 4 million shares of newly issued stock at $5 apiece, or $20 million worth of stock in total, to acquire a 5 percent stake in the company.

Miami-based Terremark runs Internet exchanges and offers services such as data storage and operating systems management. Its shares rose 33 cents, or 7.4 percent, to close at $4.80. VMware shares gained 76 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $29.26 in the regular session, and lost 8 cents after hours.

(Source: Forbes)

Release: Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance

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Seanodes today announced first official customer shipments of its Storage Virtual Appliance, the Exanodes software for VMware environments.

Exanodes VM Edition Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) is ideal for designing high-end, clustered virtual iSCSI SANs that leverage the storage resources of VMware ESX servers (internal disks, DAS) and turn them into a powerful virtual SAN in minutes. Users can configure shared virtual storage to maximize capacity, reliability and performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network storage. Exanodes VM Edition presents a compelling value for SMBs and hosted storage services such as cloud computing struggling to contain storage costs in VMware deployments without sacrificing availability or performance.

Installation, configuration and deployment of Exanodes VM Edition is simple and requires no additional hardware, no external SAN storage or fabrics, and no specific storage competencies. Thanks to a symmetric design where each ESX server participates in storage tasks, Exanodes gives VMs a large number of access points to the storage, I/O controllers and disks to ensure that every VM will get the performance it needs. Exanodes VM Edition is the only SVA inherently scalable and fault-tolerant, and resistant to bandwidth restrictions and I/O bottlenecks. Its clustered design addresses known issues with centralized SVAs, either monoserver or dual-server with one server dedicated to high availability.

As businesses look for greener alternatives that reduce power consumption, capital and operating expenses, virtual infrastructures such as Exanodes VM edition can maximize the network’s wasted disk capacity, and eliminate the need for over-provisioned external RAID storage with its excessive space, power and cooling costs. Users enjoy the full benefits of server virtualization and can leverage VMware features such as vMotion, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware High Availability, and VMware Consolidated Backup without complex, cost-prohibitive storage hardware.

Exanodes VM Edition costs $950 per ESX server and is available now through solution providers in Seanodes’ worldwide network of channel partners.