Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

I called up Kelly , Vyatta's CEO, last week as I was curious how the guys were doing. Talking to Kelly is real fun, enjoyable and enriching at the same time. Also it was great to hear that Vyatta was getting nmassively downloaded across the net. Vyatta launched a few years back and trust me in a few years from now, we'll be talking about Vyatta Gear. I am myself beginning to notice a lot more Vyatta communities build up gradually around the globe. NEW REFERENCE GUIDES Along with the final release of VC4.1 (see below), we've posted some additional documentation that segments material according to functional area. These new guides should be helpful for people looking for configuration examples. Command Reference Provides reference material for all Vyatta commands related to routing, QoS, logging and usage of the Vyatta CLI. High Availability Reference Provides command reference material and conf...

30 September 2008 - IP-based security and unified threat management (UTM) specialist, Clavister has today launched the latest version of its award-winning network security operating system. Clavister CorePlus 9.10 delivers support for virtualization and improved traffic optimization to its UTM security portfolio. At a time when companies are looking to s ave money and streamline operations with server consolidation, virtualization is increasingly being adopted. Up until now, security solutions for virtualization have been limited. Companies now have the option to buy Clavister Security Gateways supporting virtualization using VMware ESXi 3 as a virtual appliance or as conventional hardware or software appliances to suit their networks requirements. The continued growth of enterprise applications such as VoIP, and the addition of them to the network, means that companies are experiencing increased levels of traffic on the network. This introduces new security challenges and can lead...

oday's Cisco Data Center 3.0 announcements include: -- Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software release 4.1, offering virtualized application hosting services, greater application acceleration and video delivery for the branch office; -- Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) software release 3.1 for the ACE 4710 application switch, offering up to 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput and up to 2 Gbps of compression capability, and multimedia readiness on a virtualized platform; -- Cisco VFrame Data Center software release 1.2, offering end-to-end infrastructure provisioning with Cisco ACE and VMware ESX; -- New Cisco Data Center 3.0 professional programs and services to better support customers with data center deployments. CNN reporting

CHICAGO and LIVINGSTON, Scotland – June 24, 2008 – CohesiveFT, providers of the Elastic Server Platform, an on-demand service for dynamic assembly and deployment of virtual machines, and FlexiScale, a leading provider of true on-demand Cloud computing, today announced a technology partnership to enable deployment of CohesiveFT’s Elastic Servers to FlexiScale's Cloud. The integration of technologies from CohesiveFT and FlexiScale will enable true on-demand application stack assembly and deployment on a pay-as-you-go Cloud. This combination allows genuinely scaleable, high availability production environments that do not require in-house operations expertise to build and maintain such a facility. Beyond substantial manpower savings the combined solution significantly reduces capital and energy expenditures. This partnership will also allow ISVs, application developers and QA teams to dramatically increase their productivity throughout the development lif...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – June 23, 2008 – NetEx, the leader in high-speed data transport over TCP, today announced that its HyperPipe™ bandwidth optimization software technology enables ISPs, phone and cable providers to deliver next-generation wideband services over existing broadband IP networks. A HyperPipe deployment provides a double-edged bottom line benefit with new revenue opportunities from enhanced wideband services while eliminating the need for multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrades. HyperPipe is NetEx’s bandwidth optimization software application, providing up to a 10x throughput boost on any IP network. The software can be easily deployed at an ISP, telco or media company’s central office and on the customer’s cable box or PC, delivering an instant massive speed improvement requiring no investment in upgrading the network. HyperPipe has the potential to dramatically reshape the market by eliminating the billion dollar expense and extended timelines that are typically re...

Absolutely! Here's more from ZDnet! Early, pre-release views are ecstatic . You have VPN support, QOS functionality, even traffic-shaping. Download it here . Like many open source companies Vyatta has both community and subscription versions. VC4, in fact, is short for Vyatta Community. This is not just important to Vyatta, but to the market it seeks to serve. Even if phone companies subscribe to open source code, they still want to keep their proprietary tweaks. Most won’t go anywhere near a product with out a sales contract. Vyatta lets them do this. The reality of the carrier market is that today it consists almost entirely of incumbents. Fortunately there remains an immense and growing corporate market, Intranets running telecomm services and Web 2.0 companies offer that market. This is Vyatta’s sweet spot. Whether it can really build a community is less important than whether it can build a sales channel. If it can, Cisco will face its first real market threat in a deca...

The VMware Community Source program allows members to access and contribute to the source code for the VMware ESX hypervisor. The program is part of a set of co-development initiatives fostering the creation of new value-added products and functionality optimized for VMware virtualization. The deep, source-level collaboration also yields enhanced interoperability between VMware virtualization solutions and third-party vendor solutions. As a VMware Community Source Program member, NetEffect is working closely with VMware to leverage the synergies between the VMware ESX hypervisor and NetEffect’s multi-GbE adapters. Optimizing virtualization efficiencies will further enhance the adapters’ proven hardware-accelerated, multi-NIC performance, increasing application productivity with even fewer server resources. “Both NetEffect and VMware are committed to enabling enterprise users to optimize their use of and results from data center resources,” said Rick Maule, CEO of NetEffect. “The VMware...

Santa Clara, Calif. — April 29, 2008 — Woven Systems™ Inc., the leading innovator of Ethernet Fabric switching solutions based on its patented vSCALE™ technology for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters, today announced that the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, Germany) is using Woven’s EFX 1000 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) Fabric Switch and TRX 100 Ethernet Switch in a large HPC cluster to search for gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The Woven’s Ethernet Fabric provides access to more than one petabyte of data supplied by a worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors. The data is distributed to compute cluster nodes via the Woven all-Ethernet solution. “Gravitational wave research is one of the most exciting fields of science. It will open a complete new window to the universe, and requires very large-scale and sophisticated computing tech...

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...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – April 1st, 2008 – NetEx, the leader in high speed DR over IP, today announced Sync on Demand capability for its award-winning HyperIP® Data Center Acceleration solution,. This gives users a free bandwidth upgrade to perform an initial data synchronization operation between the main data center and the disaster recovery site and helps with the seamless integration of new backup software implementations. The new Sync on Demand feature is the latest move by NetEx to maximize the customer value of the highly-scalable HyperIP platform. The company previously launched a Recovery on Demand function with a similar temporary free performance upgrade for customers who experience a major outage at the main location in order to speed their recovery operations up the maximum of 800 Mbps. With the new Sync on Demand functionality, when customers first install HyperIP, the unit will include a temporary software key to run at the maximum data rate based upon the available bandwidth...

The newly released Neterion X3100 Series adapters enable multiple guest operating systems of a virtual server environment to share one physical adapter through the use of physically separate I/O channels. The X3100 offers 17 independent hardware I/O paths directly in silicon, each with independent reset and control that can be matched to a 16-core CPU virtualized server with one extra path for management. Neterion's president and CEO, Dave Zabrowski, says having true independent I/O paths directly in silicon overcomes the severe manageability limitations of other firmware-based implementations of I/O paths, which can't perform true I/O virtualization. Neterion's silicon-based architecture, he says, enables applications on virtual machines to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) with dynamic allocation of I/O bandwidth that can instantly increase to full 10Gbps throughput when required. Here for more news

AUSTIN, Texas and LOS GATOS, Calif., March 12, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, and Freescale Semiconductor, a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, today announced a collaborative effort that will enable both companies to further increase opportunities in the data storage market by jointly developing solutions that leverage the respective strengths of Hifn’s Applied Services Processors (ASPs) and card-level products, with Freescale’s industry-leading embedded processors based on Power Architecture™ technology. The partnership brings together two industry leaders with uniquely symbiotic technologies that offer potential customers competitive advantages in performance, integration, time to market, energy efficiency and scalability. Freescale’s highly integrated PowerQUICC® processors, which are used in a range of consumer and enterprise storage products where security, performance and power efficiency ...

Doing the math, if I had to purchase 100 Servers for VMware or Citrix virtualization, and had to replace 6 NICs with 2 of these, I'd be spending , if I went for 2 NICs from SMC then at the retail price of those NICs I'd get a lot more volume and speed as well, probably, but I'd be spending a whopping 260,000 Euros or $ 400,000 just on the NICs!!! Anyways their demo is here: This demonstration highlights how the combination of Solarflare’s virtualization-optimized Solarstorm™ Ethernet controller and 10Xpress® 10GBASE-T PHY delivers true 10 gigabit performance over standard Ethernet links for the most advanced applications. Solarflare-based 10GBASE-T NICs and switches, now shipping from SMC Networks, enable enterprises and data centers to easily and cost-effectively upgrade their existing networks and deploy demanding next-generation applications such as server and storage virtualization, streaming rich-media on demand and Web 2.0 that have ever-growing bandwidth requirements...

Tomorrow I'll be chatting with the CEO, Amir Ben-Efraim and ask what they do. Altor Networks site is here.

Nice article, originally seen at Doug's site and a snippet of the article: Most recently, I’ve been feeling the itch to write a worm. The idea is attractive because a worm can be developed modularly with reusable components. Each individual component will increase my knowledge substantially in a different area of security, making the development a measurable goal with incremental positive feedback. However, before development could begin, I wanted to ensure that I wouldn’t end up in court for an accidental release of one of the components gone awry. I love virtual machines as a tool to aid in the development process, so the solution was immediately obvious - create a multi-host virtual network that is isolated from the world. Further, I wanted each machine on this isolated network to occasionally be able to access the Internet to retrieve updates or tools, so the isolation needed to be complete but /controllable./ The final requirements of the virtual network ended up looking lik...

Yes, you heard it, I am throwing the term Open Source out of the window! We have seen enough battles between Open Source and Closed Source. My keynote at the International Virtualization Conference in Belgium was about just that: Usable Source! Talking to our good friend and CEO of the rockstar Networking start-up, Kelly Herrell was just the same. Kelly is a fan of Clayton Christensen , like me. I love the work of Porter, Dawkins, Beer, Nohria, Prahlad etc as well. Anyways talking to Kelly was really fun. This man is smart, witty and is steering a great start-up! As CEO and member of the Board of Directors, Kelly provides the strategic leadership and vision for Vyatta and drives it through to rapid execution. Kelly has a proven track record for growing companies based on open source in the systems, embedded and telephony industries. Before joining Vyatta, Kelly was the SVP of Strategic Operations at MontaVista Software, the world's pre-eminent embedded Linux supplier, where he l...

This coming friday I'll be chatting up with Kelly Herrel (CEO). We have had contact for about 2 years now but have never spoken to each other, can you imagine that? The company isn't quiet about taking on the big C, and why should it be? Open source companies have never been shy about taking their commercial counterparts to task. But that's not why we like them. We think Vyatta is a company to watch because it has a compelling technology, and because its offerings appeal to companies that don't have a Cisco-sized budget. (And to companies that do, but would prefer to save the money for other things, like salaries.) We also like Vyatta because it commoditizes network deployment in the same way that Linux commoditized the operating system market. Check them all out at LinuxMag

We chatted with the following parties and the interviews will soon be coming here: This is Done and should come up soon , the minute all parties are back from holidays ;-) And lots is coming your way in 2008: My first week in Jan looks more or less like this:

Funny video, I have to ask my Network Engineer to get me the latest and greatest IOS. (in my free time I am learning networking: Mostly next gen networking like Vyatta but also the old fashioned ones like Cisco) Get Dynamips here

Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It's becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering. Marcoux joined Cisco from American Power Conversion only about six weeks ago, after Cisco created the position to overlook energy issues across all parts of the company. Networking gear itself makes up a much smaller portion of IT power consumption than do servers or storage, but Cisco plans to go beyond just making its own products more efficient. Read the rest.