Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV ), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program as a Select Partner. Through this alliance, F5 gains the use of VMware testing software, marketing tools, and technical support for technology integration between the two companies. Through strategic alliances like this one, as well as its acquisition of Acopia Networks , F5 continues to add benefits for customers leveraging virtualization technologies. As IT organizations focus more and more on virtualized infrastructures, F5 encourages customers deploying Application Delivery Networks to leverage virtualization in providing secure, optimized, and highly available applications. "Virtualization platforms have matured to the point that they are now taking on enterprise class applications and workloads," said Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group. "Virtualizing critical applicati...

While Citrix XenServer takes advantage of the TCO benefits virtualization offers through server consolidation, SteelEye's Protection Suite for Citrix XenServer is an essential addition for companies to ensure continuity of the virtualization environment; plus, it integrates advanced data replication and high availability clustering technologies to monitor and automatically recover the entire Xen environment. SteelEye delivers several distinct data and application management functions, all integrated into a single solution for simple deployment. It is built on breakthrough technology which supports clustering together physical and/or virtual servers for continuous data protection, application availability and disaster recovery while providing real-time replication of active Xen Virtual Machine images. "This is a powerful alliance," said Garrett Gafke, President of SteelEye. "As a long-time supporter of the use of open source technologies for business-critical computin...

WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 29, 2008 – In the fourth quarter of 2007, data virtualization middleware solutions provider xkoto Inc. , reported significant revenue growth of more than 150 percent over the same period in 2006. The company's growth and momentum was fueled by the increasing demand from enterprise customers requiring highly reliable and scalable solutions capable of ensuring continuous access to corporate data. Highlights of the quarter and full year include the significant expansion of xkoto’s management team, distribution channel and partner programs, as well as new customer adoption in North America and Europe and a major new release of xkoto’s flagship product, GRIDSCALE ® . “Customers and prospects in virtually all data intensive segments require high performance, highly reliable, scalable access to data for mission-critical systems. As a result, we’re witnessing the rapid adoption of xkoto’s proven data virtualization technology,” said David Patrick, President and CE...

I had a great conversation with Jerry, the CTO of Marathon Technologies, a couple of days back. What I really find very interesting is that they are committing to Open Source and Xen technology. They are teaming up with Citrix to bring virtualization and the HA (High Availability) to the masses. Jerry's profile (from the site): Jerald H. Melnick, Chief Technology Officer Jerry is responsible for Marathon’s technology roadmap that is driving the convergence of high availability and virtualization technologies. Under Jerry’s leadership, Marathon is developing the first-ever fault tolerant-class software solution for virtual environments. Built in partnership with XenSource, this cutting edge product was awarded “Best New Technology” at VMworld 2007. Before joining Marathon, he held executive positions at PPGx, Inc. and Belmont Research as well as management and technical roles at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was responsible for the development and deployment of mission-cr...

If not yet, then I'd suggest you do it. Try loading it with IE, Firefox issues are being resolved! Asuumptions for the calculator: Server consolidation is conservatively estimated based on the number of servers: less than 50 servers virtualized – 8:1 consolidation ratio between 50 to 200 servers virtualized – 10:1 consolidation ratio 200 or more servers virtualized – 12:1 consolidation ratio Server consolidation ratio is halved for productivity and business critical servers being protected with everRun VM. Downtime costs are based on industry estimates for 350 person company. The ROI model prorates for a bigger or smaller company based on number of servers inputted. While server virtualization improves IT efficiency, the model does not assume any reduction in staff. Additional benefits such as savings from reduced provisioning time and reduced recovery time have been excluded from this model. Design and implementation costs estimates double at 200 servers to account fo...

"For years, the complexity of traditional storage has hindered workflow efficiency and created costly bottlenecks in enterprise operations, relegating IT to a business's overhead costs," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "However, in today's enterprise, the virtual data center - with its dramatic ease of use, cost-efficiency and performance - is absolutely necessary to turn the opportunities of today into the breakthroughs of tomorrow. To satisfy this business imperative, Isilon's clustered storage systems create a single, highly scalable, high performance, shared pool of storage, delivering a truly clustered and virtualized storage solution to transform IT from business overhead to strategic weapon." Press Release

SGI has combined its expertise in helping enterprises work with massive amounts of data and complex business processes using Oracle(R) applications with that of SWsoft(R), the world's second largest virtualization software company, to provide a landmark solution for optimizing the Oracle database with negligible data center overhead. The solution will be demonstrated at Oracle OpenWorld, November 11-15 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The demonstration features SWsoft(R) Virtuozzo(TM) operating system virtualization software, running on an SGI(R) Altix(R) server and includes a cluster of large Oracle databases. The joint solution will run the databases inside the Virtuozzo virtual environment, moving the data from one physical server to another without losing information or connectivity to the database. CNNMoney reporting.

Commoditization of HPC is just about beginning. This is the next wave that is going to come at us. when I said, in a previous post where I commented over "overwhelming innovation", I meant this as well. HPC is on its way to reach out to consumers. We look today, for advice and counseling, to big firms like Gartners, Forrsters etc. But the tomorrow, which is today, is in all of our hands. HPC just happens to be that for us. Think of genome research, power issues, geographic and tectonic researches, meteorology, mining, oceanography, etc will happen in homes tomorrow. Look at this news by RapidMind , where they are moving aggressively towards the regular x86 boxes. News from Rapidmind: Over a thousand developers of high-performance computing (HPC) and enterprise software are using RapidMind to realize the performance benefits of new multi-core processors. The RapidMind platform is being successfully leveraged in developing applications for database transactions, image/video ma...

Dan has some pointers: Before such a decision can be made, it is very important to understand what are the organization’s goals. That is, what are they really trying to accomplish. Then the appropriate selection of products can follow. As the great sage, Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” Let’s us consider typical goals and see there it leads. * Higher performance - In this scenario, the organization hopes to segment either the application or the underlying data allowing the work to be assigned to more machines. The desired result is reducing the time it takes for the work to be accomplished when compared to running the application on a single system. Quite often, a high performance computing/grid computing monitor is selected. While virtual machine software combined with the appropriate management software for virtualized environments and virtual machine replication technology could do the job, it is likely that the imposed ove...

So it’s not surprising to see the fault tolerant systems vendors turn their attention toward moving their technology into the virtual realm. It’s also not surprising to see them turn toward Xen. The open source Xen hypervisor is getting some attention. Egenera chose Xen as the platform for its virtual environment management tool last fall. And late last year Stratus forged a partnership with XenSource to embed the Xen hypervisor into its fault tolerant technology. And earlier this year, Marathon Technologies announced a deal with XenSource. While Stratus and NEC sell specially designed fault-tolerant x86 systems, Marathon sells fault tolerant software. Marathon’s software uses a virtualisation layer to make two physical servers appear as a single system. Marathon executives say their software, which can run on unmodified Windows servers, reduces the cost and complexity of traditional clustering approaches. Link

SteelEye Technology , a leading provider of VMWare protection solutions including data replication and application monitoring for business continuity and disaster recovery on Linux and Windows, announced today at VMworld 2007 that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. VMware (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, provides the Technology Alliance Partner program to enable technology vendors to support and integrate with the VMware infrastructure and deliver solutions to our joint customers. Read more...

we never ought to forget about applications, yes, its the applications that have to be addressed, no matter which technology you use. I will be talking about the importance of applications, which amidst all the virtualization craze, may taker a bit of a back seat. As Rosenblum shows with VMotion, the application gets a "warm HA' blanket as it moves to another server: Rosenblum started a server on stage that was running the equivalent of 50 users pounding on Microsoft Outlook. The server's ongoing activity was being mirrored on a second server, which was receiving a live stream of events as they were entered into the log of the virtual machine on the first server. As Rosenblum unplugged the first server, VMware's management software, Virtual Infrastructure 3, detected a failure and shifted handling the users to the secondary server. Since the secondary server was already receiving a stream of log events, it could pick up at the precise point where the other had left ...

"It was a little surprising, but welcome," said Marathon CEO Gary Phillips of the award. His company was happy to accept the TechTarget-sponsored award in the New Technology category, though Marathon "has been shipping a product since January 2004 based on a virtualization architecture," he said. "We're able to provide continuous availability, in such a way that it's transparent to the application, and everything's automated so it installs in hours. A good portion of our customers are SMBs, so they're very compelled by the fact that it's plug and play," said Phillips, who described his partner base as "100 percent channel." Marathon has about 150 channel partners, with that number breaking down about 50-50 between system builders and system integrators, Phillips said. Key Information Systems has built a successful partnership with Marathon, said Pete Elliot, VP of marketing at the Woodland Hills, Calif.-based system integrator...

Platform Computing, a leading systems infrastructure software company, and XenSource, the leading provider of enterprise-class virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen hypervisor, today announced an OEM agreement that enables Platform to integrate and bundle XenEnterprise v4 with the new version of their VM Orchestrator (VMO) solution. Under terms of the agreement, Platform will embed XenEnterprise v4 with VMO as part of a complete VM life cycle management solution, offering best of breed dynamic resource management, self-service functionality, and resource aware high availability (HA), all from a common web-based management console. A core element of VMO is Enterprise Grid Orchestrator™ (EGO) — a proven management environment and policy engine that dynamically allocates shared resources based on application priority and workload. The two companies will participate in joint marketing activities including an upcoming webinar. “XenSource is committed to an open ISV ecosystem...

Proud of you, my brothers at Marathon! Way to go! Check out the proud winners!

Got this from our friends at Marathon: We are really excited about this year’s event because we will be demonstrating an industry first -- true fault tolerant lockstepping for virtual environments with everRun software by Marathon Technologies. This milestone in technology enables the first true convergence of virtualization and availability in one complete integrated software solution and introduces the following: First and only lockstep solution for virtual machines Completely automated fault tolerance for virtual machines What are the benefits of everRun lockstepping? Enables mission-critical applications to be virtualized/consolidated Completely automated setup, configuration, fault detection and management Application agnostic If you’re going to be in the San Francisco area September 11 – 13, and plan on attending VMworld please stop by the New Innovators Section (Area 1301) of the Moscone Convention Center. In the meantime if you have any questions or want t...

The agreement comes at time when many DSS customers have expressed interest in implementing a high availability solution to protect their data networks and applications. The alliance will enable DSS customers, primarily in the entertainment, public utilities, retail, banking and healthcare industries, protect their critical applications through any faults, failures and disasters. “We continue to strive to partner with industry leading providers that understand our customers’ requirements, challenges and technology goals,” said Mike Duhaime, Director of Storage Sales at DSS. “Integrating everRun into our proven line of IT solutions enables us to implement and support the most appropriate level of high availability for our customers’ critical environments. We look forward to offering Marathon’s solutions to our growing customer base.” Marathon’s everRun line of fault tolerant-class availability products protects Microsoft Windows applications from leading sources of downtime while elimin...

We have been building and even doing our performance/benchmarks tests on the ESX 3.x and Oracle RAC. And Sun folks too want to demo their cool software on ESX. However, VMware ESX has a feature called Raw Device Mapping (RDM), which allows the guest operating systems to have direct access to the devices, bypassing the VMware layer. More information on RDM can be found in VMware documentation. The following documents could be starting points: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_intro_vi.pdf http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_san_cfg.pdf RDM works with either Fibre Channel or iSCSI only. In the setup here, a SAN storage box connected through Fibre Channel was used for mapping LUNS to the physical hosts. These LUNS could then be mapped onto the VMware guests using RDM. SCSI reservations have been found to be working fine with RDM (both SCSI-2 Reserve/Release and SCSI-3). These RDM devices could therefore be used as shared devices between the cluster nodes. However, of course they can...