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BitLeap LeapServ Backup Software Goes Virtual

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Offsite backup provider BitLeap today announced it has extended its LeapServ software platform to customer provided VMware environments.

The new LeapServVM product will consist of a custom built VM system file supplied to the customer, which can be loaded into existing VMware environments to perform all of the services typically provided by a dedicated LeapServ network appliance.

The LeapServVM will be a licensed copy of BitLeap’s LeapServ technology when bundled with data backup or e-mail archiving services. While active, the software and its performance will be fully managed by BitLeap just like any traditional physical LeapServ appliance.

BitLeap’s CEO Guy Suter:

“The ability to setup a LeapServ on virtual machines will greatly expand the implementation and deployment options available to our customers. We have created a system to custom build LeapServ software to specific customer needs, which will enable us to support a wide range of VMware environments. We are excited to offer this new option and to see the innovative ways it will be put to use.”

One of the major benefits to the LeapServVM is that its core backup methodology is agent-less, allowing users to backup data from virtually all systems through standard network protocols. The LeapServVM product can also be beneficial when customers would like to phase in or evaluate offsite data backup technology from BitLeap.

The LeapServVM software license and file creation fee for up to 500 gigabytes of backup storage is $500 and for up to 1 terabyte of backup storage is $750.

[Source: MarketWatch]

Exclusive Video: VMware In A Nutshell, By Product Marketing Manager John Gilmartin

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So what’s VMware all about now on a technology level, now that their stock went tumbling and their CEO has been replaced? John Gilmartin, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware answered our questions on virtualization in general and their strategy and product portfolio in particular.

After defining virtualization and virtual machines, John dives deeper into what drives prospective virtualization customers (infrastructure consolidation, high availability, business continuity, disaster recovery?). He also shares more on their recently announced VMsafe initiative, which allows trusted partners to ‘peak’ into a Virtual Machine and identify threats from the outside of the operating systems and the applications they try to protect.

John underlines that VMware is offering features far beyond the basic data center consolidation needs; such as life cycle management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), automated provisioning, fail over, disaster recovery and optimize the management tasks for a virtual infrastructure.

All this is part of VMware’s from-desktop-to-datacenter portfolio and makes VMware feel confident and well positioned to compete with Hyper-V from Microsoft.

Breaking: Diane Greene Leaves VMware, Paul Maritz To Become CEO and President

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VMware co-founder Diane Greene (see BusinessWeek profile) has been ousted as president and chief executive of the company and will be replaced by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz (we reported on him joining EMC’s cloud computing division earlier this year), effective immediately. The company also said that while it “is not updating guidance for the second quarter, we expect revenues for the full year of 2008 will be modestly below the previous guidance of 50% growth over 2007.” The mean estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial was for 51% growth to $2 billion.

Shares of the virtualization software maker went tumbling in recent trading. The stock was recently down 24.3% to $40.26 a share. Shares have fallen by two-thirds the past eight months. The stock went public at $29 and rocketed in its first two months of trading to as high as $125 a share.

On Fortune.com’s Go West blog, Adam Lashinsky writes that VMware “was so loved by investors that it singlehandedly drove the valuation of EMC, whose best move this decade may have been buying VMware before it had the opportunity to go public the first time.”

Things change. VMware stock is falling big time since the news got out.

It’s highly likely that EMC has replaced Diane Greene because of the poor revenue outlook. Also worth noting is that we reported a rumor earlier today about VMware possibly being fully spun out of EMC (which now becomes highly unlikely, considering Paul Maritz’ track record).

We’ll post more details as soon as they’re available. We’re wondering how the VMware troops will react on the news, and what will happen with Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist at VMware and Greene’s husband.

This is the official take from the company’s chairman, Joe Tucci:

“As one of the founders and the leader of VMware, Diane guided the creation and development of a company that is changing the way that people think about computing,” Tucci said in the statement. “The Board thanks her for her considerable contributions to VMware and wishes her every success in the future.”

Reuters has a comment from Jefferies and Co analyst Katherine Egbert, who was disappointed the company did not hold a conference call to explain why it was cutting its revenue forecast.

“She said she suspects VMware is concerned that sales of its server virtualization software will get squeezed by new competition from Microsoft, which late last month started selling a rival product. Microsoft introduced that product, which costs far less than VMware’s offering, six weeks ahead of its previously announced launch date.”

Update: VMwareVideos reminded us of this video of Diane Greene talking about VMworld.

They also found this one featuring the new CEO and President, Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft Corp executive, reflecting on what it’s like to have Bill Gates review your stuff.

[Source: MarketWatch]

Rich Wolski on Eucalyptus: Open Source Cloud Computing (Video Interview – 1/2)

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A month ago we reported on how you can build your own open source cloud on clusters to make your personal cloud dreams come true!  Simply put your datacenter to use by ordering Xen virtualization on the Rocks and then carefully roll it in fresh Eucalyptus leaves.

In order to learn what makes these clouds tick, we have sent our enthusiastic cloud computing koala Toon Vanagt to San Francisco to interview Eucalyptus Director Rich Wolski at the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Below, you can find the first part of this exclusive video interview (we’ll post the second part tomorrow).

Rich’s students came up with EUCALYPTUS, which stands for ‘Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems’ as an open-source tool for doing “cloud computing”. Their tool is designed to stimulate the development, interest, experiments and research into the nascent concept and industry of cloud computing.

Eucalyptus was build in a modular fashion, so it can “mimic” the interface of popular commercial clouds, like the one they started off with, Amazon EC2. The team plans support for several cloud interfaces as long as they are public and well documented.

Rich underlined that Eucalyptus is designed to experiment and not to compete with industrial strength clouds as Amazon EC2. Although with some engineering, one could take parts of Eucalyptus, mature those and scale to specific needs.

When asked about the underlying virtualization experience, Xen is seen as a very useful technology in ‘cloud’ regards. Rich complements Xen on being well documented and conceptually easy to understand and he looks back at the Xen selection as a good first hypervisor choice. Due to the nature of their specific use, parts of Xen would ‘break’ under load and were modified to meet certain stability needs.

As LibVert is used, Eucalyptus should in theory be relatively easy be able to support other hypervisors such as VMware and KVM. If no major wrinkles appear on the development surface, Eucalyptus therefore expects to support VMware and KVM with its 2.0 release, scheduled for early September 2008.

Rich supportively points to the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure. as an alternative open source virtualization system.

Security remains an issue but in some respects, accountability and authentication are an even bigger problem to the open source community than within commercial projects. “In an academic space, where you are not paying for usage, it is not a credit card that you are accounting to, but a user”. So Eucalyptus had to devise a user accounting system that is based on certificates. On top of that components should not be ‘spoofable’, as there is no message encryption in Eucalyptus (yet). Because these messages can be spoofed, Rich’s team had to take care of an open source implementation of Web Services Security to make sure the cloud controllers cannot be ‘fooled’ by malicious messages of doubtful origin.

The shortage of public IP addresses in university environments was solved by using the open source technology VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet). [VDE is an ethernet compliant virtual network that can be spawned over a set of physical computer over the Internet. You can see VDE as the software incarnation of a hardware network switch plus attached cables. Using the vde_switch and vde_plug programs you are able to create quite complex virtual analogies of a network that can span several hosts, even across the Internet.

By creating a virtual Ethernet for every cluster allocation and make that a set of user space processes can tunnel through NATs (Network Address Translation). As a downside to this VDE implementation comes a performance penalty. So Eucaluptus is offered with 2 flavors, linked to the SLA-nature in cloud computing. The first option uses the described very flexible ‘Virtual VLAN’ independent of IP-addresses. The second option bypasses VDE and is faster but less scalable as limits user requests to the confines of a single cluster.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish the second part of this exclusive interview. Stay tuned!

VMware Online Store Now Has Academic Discounts on Workstation and Fusion

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For current students, prospective university students, or academic faculty and staff, VMware has just made it easier to purchase VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion at an academic discount. Through the all new academic portal, students can get a discount to up to 50% off the commercial list pricing if they purchase VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion for personal use.

Previously, the only way to get access to VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation at their academic prices was to purchase at an outlet like a campus book store that happened to stock the software.

EMC Shares Up On VMware Spin-out Rumors

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Update: you might want to read this article about VMware co-founder Diane Greene leaving VMware before you read this post. Come back, though 😉

Financial analyst Thomas Curlin of RBC Capital Markets upped his rating on the EMC stock to “Outperform” from “Sector Perform”, even as it trimmed the stock’s price target from $21 to a more modest $19. The focus of his call: the prospects for a spin-out of the company’s stake in VMware.

Curlin notes that the company can spin out VMware to shareholders with minimal tax implications starting in early 2009. In his research note, Curlin writes:

“Management recently has suggested it does not plan to spin out VMware, but if the stock remains at current levels, we believe it could be forced to do so by activist shareholders. This possible scenario is a key aspect of our recommendation upgrade as it provides downside protection in a challenging macro context.”

Curlin figures that EMC is trading at a value of about $6.25 ex its stake in VMW; but he thinks the non-VMW business is worth $10-$14 a share. Shares of EMC closed at $15.05.

[Source: Tech Trader Daily]