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AbiCloud from Abiquo

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Last month Abiquo announced the release of their “abiCloud”, an open source cloud computing platform for allowing companies to create and manage large, complex IT infrastructures (virtual servers, networks, applications, storage…) in a quick, simple and scalable way.

We had a chat with Diego Mariño, Co-founder & CEO of Abiquo , he told us that
one of the key differences of AbiCloud is the the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. He told us “You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a virtual machine. This version allows to deploy instances over VirtualBox, but we support VMware, KVM and Xen too.”

As their first tester had its infrastructure on Virtualbox and because its very simple to have it up and running in different architectures that’s where their first focus is at.

Today they support Xen & KVM through libvirt, and the connectors for these hypervisors will be offered during Q2. Support for VMware, is offered to hosting providers with closed modules.

Basically, Abiquo allows to companies to convert their infrastructure into a service. Other competitors in the field include the recently founded Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and sun via it’s Qlayer acquisition.

Abiquo says it has a different focus and approach , what they are offering is the ability to create private clouds for more complex infrastructures.

The have their own open API which will be released in Q3 , with no plans to support the Amazon’s API

AbiCloud is available for Download from SF.net

Apologies For The Radio Silence

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We would like to apologize to our readers, and particularly those who subscribe to our RSS feed and/or e-mail newsletter, for not posting any news for the past couple of days. We moved offices and it took us a while to get our internet access back. But we’re back now, and here’s an overview of what happened while we were sitting on a tropical island in no-internet-hell.

Veeam has a new CFO (William H. Largent)

BlueStripe Software raised Series B funding to the tune of $8 million from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures.

CohesiveFT added both Fedora Core 10 and Internal Eucalyptus Cloud Deployment Option to its Elastic Server platform

Tranxition has announced general availability of LiveManage for Virtual Migrations 7.0

VMware has announced vSphere, its infamous cloud operating system (and then some)

rPath has announced rBuilder 5

Pano Logic has appointed Parmeet S. Chaddha as executive vice president of engineering

VMware put out their financial numbers for the first quarter of 2009

Leostream released Connection Broker 6.0

Citrix today announced that the beta release of XenServer 5.5 (code-named “Project George”) is available

Hitachi Data Systems Introduces New Replication Support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

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Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, today announced the immediate availability of the second generation of Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Today’s announcement adds support for the midrange Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage family, providing customers continuous, real time local and remote replication and automatic failover capabilities to ensure resilient data protection, high availability and disaster recovery for VMware environments.

As more businesses implement VMware virtualization, they need to ensure that the data generated in this virtual environment is properly protected. At the same time, businesses are discovering that traditional approaches to disaster recovery and business continuity are not as cost-effective in virtual environments. To address these pressing customer challenges to ensure greater uptime at lower operational costs, the Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter facilitates the linkage between Hitachi market leading system-based replication technologies, including Hitachi Universal Replicator, Hitachi TrueCopy Synchronous, Hitachi TrueCopy Extended Distance and Hitachi ShadowImage in-system replication software, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Coupled together, these software solutions provide operational resilience, robust data protection, recovery management and replication capabilities optimized for VMware Infrastructure.

The Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter links Hitachi replication software and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to provide tremendous operational resilience, robust data protection, and recovery management and replication capabilities that complement VMware Infrastructure.

New EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture Good News for Virtual Data Center Storage Scalability

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EMC today unveiled a new approach to high-end data storage with an innovative new architecture purpose-built to support virtual data centers. EMC also announced the first storage system based on this architecture, which will serve as a cornerstone of virtual computing infrastructures that are transforming the technology landscape.

The new EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture integrates industry-standard components with EMC Symmetrix capabilities to deliver massive scalability – enabling systems that scale to hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second) supporting hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure. It is the first storage architecture that combines the performance and efficiency of a scale-up architecture and the cost-effective flexibility of a scale-out architecture. It was designed and built from the ground up to break the physical boundaries of data center storage, incorporates automation to simplify storage management, enables resources to be scaled on demand and uses less energy per terabyte of data stored than traditional high-end storage systems.

Full details about the new architecture and new systems are available here.

The first storage system based on this innovative new architecture is the EMC Symmetrix V-Max system, which is available immediately. It is the world’s largest high-end storage array and uses multi-core processors to lower power costs and improve IOPS per dollar. Combined with the latest generation Enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel and SATA drives, the Symmetrix V-Max system allows users to cost effectively meet the widest range of storage requirements for high performance and high capacity in a single system. It joins the market-leading EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 system and expands EMC’s high-end portfolio. Together they represent the two newest high-end storage architectures on the market today.

The high-availability Symmetrix V-Max Engine at the center of the new system is a flexible building block that features multiple redundant Quad-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors with up to 128 GB (gigabytes) of memory and up to 16 host and 16 drive channel connections. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows Symmetrix V-Max Engines to interconnect and share resources. This enables a Symmetrix V-Max system to scale to 1024 GB (gigabytes) of global memory, with twice as many front-end and back-end connections compared to the industry-leading Symmetrix DMX-4 systems. The ability to interconnect and share resources to easily and linearly scale out is a key customer requirement as virtual machines and applications are dynamically added and shifted.

The Symmetrix V-Max system provides more than three times the performance, twice the connectivity and three times more usable capacity than Symmetrix DMX-4 systems and uses significantly less power per terabyte and per IOP. As part of EMC’s Early Adopter Program, more than 30 of the new systems have already been shipped to customers with some of the world’s largest data centers, including EMC’s own state-of-the-art production data center.

New Automated Management Tools

In virtualized environments, there are significant benefits to consistent and rapid provisioning of storage to multiple physical servers and server clusters. The Symmetrix V-Max system automates storage provisioning, reducing the time and complexity of provisioning by 95 percent. Integration with numerous VMware features enables both server and storage resources to be provisioned on demand, with centralized management, reporting and control. In addition, EMC ControlCenter(R) support for both the Symmetrix V-Max storage system and VMware will increase visibility and automate reporting across the virtual server and storage environments.

In tiered storage environments, Symmetrix V-Max systems enable data to be non-disruptively relocated to different storage tiers and RAID protections, including ultra- high performing Enterprise Flash Drives, traditional Fibre Channel disk drives and high-capacity SATA disk drives based on business requirements. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows customers to relocate more data in less time and with less impact to overall performance than any competitor, while also maintaining local and remote replication activities to ensure continuous protection for today’s “24 by forever” data centers.

EMC also announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (“FAST”), its innovative automation technology. Leveraging the Virtual Matrix Architecture’s unprecedented data relocation capabilities, FAST will automate the movement of data across multiple storage tiers based upon business policies, predictive models and real-time access patterns. This will further accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Flash Drives by enabling customers to more effectively leverage Flash performance together with the cost-effective capacities of SATA hard drives for improved return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. This new technology will be available on Symmetrix V-Max systems later this year.

The New Symmetrix V-Max Tiered Storage System

The first new Symmetrix model based on the Virtual Matrix Architecture is the Symmetrix V-Max storage system, the world’s largest high-end storage array, featuring:

  • Up to 128 Intel Xeon processor cores
  • Up to 1 TB (terabyte) of global memory
  • Fibre Channel/FICON/Gigabit Ethernet/iSCSI connectivity
  • Latest generation Flash/Fibre Channel/SATA drive support
  • Scale to 2,400 drives
  • Maximum usable, protected capacity of 2 PBs (petabytes)

Accelerated Data Migrations For Improved Efficiency and Agility

To help customers take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture, EMC Global Services introduced a new EMC Migration Suite of tools and services to accelerate migration processes and execute migrations to the new architecture up to 50 percent faster and more efficiently. The EMC Migration Suite leverages comprehensive and unique best practices and EMC E-Lab(TM) interoperability testing to minimize risk, time and complexity.

EMC Proven Solutions for Major Data Center Applications

The unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max systems provide customers with new efficient ways to address the needs of their most critical data center applications, including those from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. EMC has an initial set of EMC Proven Solutions that help accelerate implementation of VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle applications with Symmetrix V-Max systems, with additional solutions under development. These documented best practices and services from industry experts take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture to maximize resources at the lowest possible cost.

Innovative Financing Options

EMC Global Financial Services offers innovative financing options for Symmetrix V-Max systems that can help customers further lower their total cost of ownership.

The Symmetrix V-Max system is generally available today.

StorMagic Launches Channel Program for StorMagic, VMware Partners

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StorMagic last week announced details of its enhanced channel partner program, which targets resellers and system integrators in the VMware community. Through this program, StorMagic channel partners get access to a unique promo key, which their customers can use to download a free copy of the StorMagic SvSAN with no expiration date and management of up to 2 TB of data. SvSAN is a storage virtual appliance that enables the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for VMware environments for less than US$2,000.

Benefits of becoming a StorMagic channel partner include:

  • Two levels of membership (Preferred and Premier) with generous discounts
  • Qualified sales lead generation and lead distribution to partners
  • Customized marketing campaigns for lead generation, follow-up and renewals
  • Joint marketing and selling with the StorMagic team
  • Sales training and access to dedicated StorMagic sales representatives
  • Opportunity protection through deal registration with incremental margin
  • Referral fees for non-reseller partners
  • 24X7 access to the StorMagic partner website with useful tools, information, as well as case entry and management
  • Ongoing web-based and onsite training.

StorMagic SvSAN works with VMware vCenter Server so that administrators are able to manage datastores, the StorMagic iSCSI SAN, and the internal RAID controller from one interface. With capacity that starts at 2 TB and scales to unlimited storage, the SvSAN enables administrators to create, manage and provision datastores through a single-operation, which allows them to rapidly deploy datastores without managing multiple applications. Add-on features include active-active mirroring for high-availability and capacity management upgrades.

ICC Global Hosting Joins VMware Service Provider Program

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ICC Global Hosting today announced its membership in the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) to extend its relationship with VMware in delivering hosted virtual desktops in the Cloud.

As both a VSPP and VMware VIP Partner Program member, ICC Global Hosting augments its relationship with VMware and supports the VMware vCloud and VMware vClient Initiatives with ICC Global Hosting’s desktop-as-a-service offering.

ICC Global Hosting’s proven methodology teamed with VMware’s leadership in desktop virtualization delivers a robust virtual desktop as a service that reduces cost and management associated with desktop support.  These hosted desktops help assure a consistent end user experience with the most current software and patches while increasing the client’s data security.  Desktops as a service allows customers to move their desktop expense from a CapEx to OpEx expenditure which more accurately reflects desktop support as an expense.

“VMware is helping our service provider partners build the eco-structure to host customers in the Cloud by leveraging our industry-leading virtualization platform,” said Geoffrey Waters, director, VMware Service Provider Program, VMware. “For those enterprises considering desktop virtualization, ICC Global Hosting can provide all the benefits of virtual desktops combined with the benefits of cloud computing.”