Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

EWeek's labs picked up some neat collection of VMware's virtual appliances. Although I don't seem to read anywhere what the criteria might have been, it is important to note that these appliances are a security/application centric collection, I haven't been visiting the marketplace for some time so do go there and check out some stuff there. They have a huge collection out there. Here's EWeek's top 5

SAN FRANCISCO -- X has arrived and it's an appliance. Hyped and kept under wraps for months and promoted here with banners proclaiming, "The X is coming," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company's foray into hardware during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. The result of three years of development with HP, Oracle revealed the Exadata product line, which includes the HP Oracle Database machine and HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. "We really need much more performance out of our databases than we currently get," Ellison said. "Information is proliferating at an astonishingly high rate. The disk storage system available today simply cannot cope with data that has to move. Large databases are tripling in size every two to three years. That creates a fundamental problem. They can't move that data off the disks fast enough." The result is a "data bandwidth problem" moving data between the storage arrays and database servers. The answer...

SAN JOSE, CA, Apr 29, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX News Network) -- Secure Computing Corporation (NASDAQ: SCUR), a leading enterprise gateway security company, today announced it is working with VMware to provide customers with security gateway virtual appliances for organizations of all sizes. These security gateway appliances for VMware environments will provide customers with an easy way to implement and manage security for multiple virtual machines, or multiple applications within a virtual machine, through a single gateway. This enables customers to capitalize on the business benefits of VMware virtualization -- such as reduced capital and operating expenses, assured business continuity and a "greener" carbon footprint -- while ensuring security across the datacenter in ways not possible in a physical environment. According to leading research firm Gartner Inc.'s report "Virtualization Changes Virtually Everything" (by Philip Dawson and Thomas J. Bittman, M...

LOS GATOS, Calif., April 28, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, will feature its new Unified Storage Bundle, a complete go-to-market secure iSCSI solution for OEMs, the award-winning Swarm, an encrypted iSCSI SAN/NAS appliance and the Express DR data reduction accelerator cards at the Microsoft Management Summit 08, April 28 through May 2 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Booth #111. Attendees are encouraged to stop by the Hifn booth and test drive the Swarm™ iSCSI software. Highlights of the software include storage consolidation, centralized management, remote replication capabilities, advanced data protection and seamless integration with Microsoft Windows environments. The company will also have on hand experts to discuss the role of encryption for compliance. Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is the premier event for Windows Systems Administrators. For nine consecutive years, MMS has built a leading reputation by offering attende...

LiveSync Peer-To-Peer storage technology enables Enterprise Grade features such as High Availability Backup VM Server with Automatic Failover and Live Migration. The EnSpeed LiveSync technology is also compatible with other standard Linux distributions such as RedHat 5.1 and CentOS 5.1. LiveSync is also included in EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, stand-alone VM Server software that installs on bare metal. In addition, Thinsy Corporation also announced the availability of a new version of EnSpeed VM Orchestrator, their VM Management Server that provides an intuitive web browser GUI for managing LiveSync VM Servers. This new version of EnSpeed VM Orchestrator has been enhanced with support for Cloned VMs and full SSL secured connections. For additional information on EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, please visit http://www.thinsy.com/ . Free downloads of the fully functional LiveSync rpm for Oracle VM Server 2.1.1 and RedHat 5.1, EnSpeed VMM with LiveSync, and EnSpeed VM Orchestrator are availabl...

LOS GATOS, Calif., March 31, 2008 – Hifn™ (NASDAQ: HIFN), the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, will showcase its Swarm™ secure iSCSI SAN appliances at FOSE 2008 Conference and Exhibition, April 1-3 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., Booth #1517N. Hifn’s Swarm appliances are the only iSCSI storage appliances available with integrated AES256 hardware data encryption, providing a simple-to-deploy and easy-to-use, out-of-the-box regulatory compliance solution for government installations facing the complexity of protecting people’s data and mandates governing the retention of information. In addition, Hifn’s Swarm 3000 model was the world’s first iSCSI storage appliance to feature RAID level 6, adding an extra layer of protection against potential data loss during the longer array rebuild times associated with high-capacity SATA drives. Hifn’s IP SAN storage system allows government users to leverage their existing Gigabit Ethernet infrast...

Littleton , Mass. , March 24, 2008 — Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant , high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun ® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold: 1. Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications 2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies 3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption Enabling Virtualization of Production Applications To date, most of the applications that have been migrated to virtual servers remain in...

LeftHand Networks, a provider of iSCSI SANs, announced that Anite, an IT services and system integration company, has deployed LeftHand Networks' Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) in two of its data centers using a VMware virtual server environment. Based in the United Kingdom, Anite is an international software and solutions company whose primary business is the provision of industry-specific solutions for wireless telecoms, public sector and travel markets. "Historically Anite has had little islands of IT," said Jeremy Moss, group IT director for Anite. "We run some fairly standard business applications, including customer support systems." Link

We had spoken to John Matze sometime back when they released their Swarm Appliance for VMware. To get to know more about the Swarm Appliance, I'd suggest you click here . They are quietly selling as well John's profile: VP of Business Development John Matze previously was the founder and CEO of Siafu Software (acquired by Hifn in 2007), where his mission was to develop storage appliances that offer enterprise-level functionality and encryption for small to medium sized companies. Matze, one of CRN Magazine's 2003 Top 25 Innovators, is also one of the original authors of the iSCSI protocol. He has over 15 years of storage software experience including: vice president & CTO, Overland Storage; director of software, Veritas Software; and principal architect, STAC. Matze has also been the creator of many successful products including: Overland Storage REO products, Okapi ipXcelerator, STAC Replica for NetWare and APC PowerChute UPS Monitoring Software. John, can you please ...

Fortisphere Virtual Essentials™ Provides Organizations with Control, Visibility and Policy-Enforced Best Practices Chantilly, Va.—January 14, 2007— Fortisphere, a provider of enterprise virtual machine lifecycle management software, today announced the general availability of Fortisphere Virtual Essentials™, a virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management solution suite. Providing organizations with cradle-to-grave identification, tracking, reporting and management of online and offline virtual machines, Virtual Essentials delivers unprecedented visibility and control throughout enterprise virtual infrastructures. This new solution is based on Fortisphere’s pioneering Smart Growth™ approach to rapidly expanding virtual infrastructures through greater visibility, granular control, and policy-enforced best practices. “The continued growth in the enterprise adoption of virtualization technologies is surfacing operational challenges in many areas, but chief among the concerns identif...

We have just finished the report, you will get this one very soon at several places and events: Places: Avastu's site (Go to White Papers) Events: European Virtualization Event by Profoss

Administrators will be able to customize these VMs. So, for example, a network administrator could keep a customized image of Ubuntu 7.10 server that's been optimized as a Web server on tap for whenever the company needed more Web-serving power. Or, a business could set up an Ubuntu desktop VM with the company's preferred blend of software applications already pre-set to work on the company intranet, and then clone them up to users' PC as needed. As Kir Kolyshkin, the OpenVZ project manager, said in a statement, "We wanted to give our users a fast, easy way to deploy Ubuntu in a virtualized environment." Check it out more at eWeek!

Microsoft and other OS vendors have definite reasons to worry. When you get into the "Virtual Appliance" mindset, you just think of the app, you don't even want to (or must I say have to) touch the OS. There is a big chance that Linux will gain popularity with its simpler, thinner images BUT be warned Microsoft too is going strong with its console based OS. In order for a virtual machine to run, users need to have a virtual server in place, explained Gary Chen, enterprise research, SME IT infrastructure and applications senior analyst at the Yankee Group. He is author of the new Yankee Group report, "Virtually Possible: Virtual Appliances Ready to Shake Up Application Delivery." Enterprises may use virtual servers from Xen, VMware and even Microsoft's new Hyper-V. All of them support a standard called OVF (Open Virtual Machine Format), Chen said. In a world of virtual machine-delivered software, open source OSes, such as Linux, may gain greater use, becaus...

It is cute to see this title though: DataCore Announces Portable, Feature-Packed VM Starter SAN That Runs on VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, SUN, and Citrix XenServer Virtualization Platforms, Hardware Servers and Blades Actually reading: Folks we support anything, even your grandma's external disk with a ganny-SAN ;-). But seriously I don't blame these guys at all, the industry is so totally confused that complementary vendors want to do everyone at once! Market Impact No other vendor makes embracing storage virtualization as easy and as risk-free as DataCore does, period. Many vendors are talking about ‘ one off ’ virtual appliances. DataCore software is portable – offering the best out-of-the-box experience on the market, whereby any DataCore solution runs on any physical or virtual hardware of choice: hardware servers, blade servers or VMs. Users can mix-and-match any hardware in their deployments. Moreov...

Hardware virtualization is not new. Chip makers are struggling hard to make it a reality. It will become a reality. Today virtualization vendors are dancing to the tunes of market developments and community needs. "Do we given them para-virtualization?", "do we keep going strong with full virtualization?'. Questions that plague not only market leader today such as VMware but also the competitors. Oracle and Sun have spoken about it in the past as well. Sun was right when it said: "The Network is the computer" and when I looked up (on FindArticles, a good place BTW to look for the "future", if you know what I mean) for some information about a Os-less application stack, I came across Oracle's "RAW Iron" project. Quoting this older news from 1998: By picking his Nov. 16 keynote speech to unveil the Raw Iron project, Ellison timed the announcement for the same day as Microsoft's heavily promoted launch of SQL Server 7.0, a major up...

"Oracle has not certified any Oracle software on VMware virtualized environments," the company said in a statement. Thus, "Oracle support will assist customers running Oracle software on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS without virtualization, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running VMware. If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS without virtualization. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware for support." In other words, customers can expect Oracle's help only if they can prove that a bug is totally unrelated to the virtualization platform they are using. Link

Had a really good talk with David Lynch, VP Embotics. We shared some similar visions about the data center. Funny when I checked David's resume, he's too been a sailor or has had something to do with the maritime industry. ( Check out the executive board ). My impressions of the telephonic conversation: Embotics is a solid, well funded private company. These guys seem to know pretty well what they are coming out with. They are still doing a private beta with select customers and are gaining tremendous insights (Geez, I can imagine!) on its role within an organizations. What I liked about David was that he engaged me in a conversationalist style, we are all stuck in this hyped-up hypervisor age. Microsoft and all other guys are jumping in with their products, but we need to address serious issues around the virtualized data center (partial or full). I am very curious to check out the embotics product, when it hits the market, for now, check out the interview: Me: Please tell us...

I like reading chuck's blog. I do that primarily because he is focused and addresses issues that we all tend to forget in all the hullo-bullo of virtualization game. No IT user wants support hassles. So it's routine to ask any OS vendor, "does application vendor X support your operating environment?". True for all the UNIXes. And true for server/desktop virtualization. Now, it doesn't matter if the application in question works perfectly; the real question is that -- if there's a support problem -- will the ISV in question will step up and fix the problem? I think there are two reasons why the answer will usually be a rather unclear "well ...", especially for things like VMware. First, it costs more for the ISV to support an additional environment, and unless they can see clear incremental revenue (e.g. licenses, maintenance, etc.) it's hard to make an internal case. Of course, customers beating you over the head helps a bit to move that discus...

And why the heck would you care about Oracle VMs? Well Humphrey thinks otherwise: Who needs a hypervisor just for Oracle? Lots of enterprise folk, some say. "Products like Oracle VM can be excellent tools that enable IT to increase their server utilization, and dramatically reduce complexity and overall total cost of ownership," said IDC analyst John Humphreys in a prepared statement. At least one other analyst isn't so sure enterprises are ready to use different hypervisors for different applications in the fashion Oracle's announcement implies. "It remains early days for standards that handle the control and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures sourced from different vendors," writes Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff in his blog today. "It’s perhaps more thinkable that Oracle database and application servers might be kept independent from a general virtual infrastructure than would be the case with other, often less business-cri...

ostPath, creator of the industry's only email and collaboration server that offers enterprises a drop-in alternative to Exchange™, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with VMware, the world's leading provider of virtualization solutions for x86-based servers and desktops. PostPath also announced the immediate availability of PostPath Server VMware Edition , a pre-assembled Linux and PostPath Server VMware image (or "Virtual Appliance") that customers can deploy without installing an operating system and that requires the bare minimum of site-specific configuration. PostPath Server VMware Edition is the first enterprise-compatible virtualized corporate email server environment. The EMMES Corporation, a Contract Research Organization (CRO) located in Maryland that supports clients in clinical and biomedical research, was an early user of the PostPath Server VMware Edition . Evan Wagner, director of network operations and security at EMMES, said, ...