Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

US-based software maker VMware plans to more than double its research and development staff in China within 18 months, despite the economic slowdown. "China is one of the fastest growing markets for us and the fundamentals for the market will remain strong," said Mike Clayville, vice-president and general manager of VMware. "We are going to increase the R&D staff here up to 300 within 18 months as well as strengthen our field resources dramatically." The company pioneered the market for virtualization technology, which helps a single computer server handle the work of several servers. According to Clayville, the technology could reduce a customers' hardware expenses by as much as 90 percent and energy use up to 88 percent. As a result of the global economic crisis, many businesses are expected to resort to cost-cutting measures, which may boost demand for technologies such as virtualization, analysts said. Source

Breakthrough Storage Performance: Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250 percent. IBM has demonstrated, for the first time, the game-changing impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals manage and access information. The results were achieved using Flash solid-state technology coupled with IBM's industry leading, highly scalable storage virtualization technology. Under the codename "Project Quicksilver," IBM achieved groundbreaking results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over one million Input/Output (I/O) per second -- with a response time of under one millisecond (ms). Compared to the fastest industry benchmarked disk system, Quicksilver improved performance(1) by 250 percent at less than 1/20th the response time...

VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) is an open API / SDK to develop applications that create or access VMware virtual disk storage. VDDK supports virtual disk files (VMDKs) for both VI (Virtual Infrastructure Products) as well as Hosted products (Workstation, Server, Player). And lets take a look at what we have at hand: The Virtual Disk Development Kit is a collection of C libraries, code samples, utilities, and documentation to help you create or access VMware virtual disk storage. The kit includes: The Virtual Disk library, a set of C function calls to manipulate virtual disk (VMDK) files. C++ code samples that you can build with either Visual Studio or the GNU C compiler. Virtual Disk Manager utility to manipulate offline VMDK files on Windows or Linux (clone, create, relocate, rename, grow, shrink, or defragment). DiskMount utility to access files and file systems in virtual disks on Windows or Linux. Documentation about the Virtual Dis...

Industry leaders who have founded largest companies in the world and are still leading them successfully, even in these turbulent times, such as Larry Ellison , William Gates , Steve Jobs already knew how to do business . I had been wondering lately if B-schools like Wharton are really worth anything at all. In this age when we are looking at the East and South (Africa and S. America), we are not into any of those ivy cuddly alumni circles anymore. We are doing businesses with people who have learned the business the hard way. The real world way, the path the likes of Ellison, Jobs and the Gates took. So I will be writing these multi-part series where we'll do school to school analysis. I'll try to call up the PR per school and ask them simple questions as if I were applying for a admission and would like to have things like these answered: Why would I throw away 2 years and spend 100,000 to 200,000 dollars into a school? So expect this multi-part series to be a amalgam of r...

While testing might seem a easy and an unimportant area (Can you imagine an "architect" guy was wondering what test, development terms were doing in the design doc yesterday), it is the platform where people validate their assumptions and get on to make more fact-based decisions. I think Symantec is on a good and sturdy path. I have been wondering lately about these firms, especially the bigger ones like Symantec and McAfee. Talking to several of the folks within these firms helped me understand their stance and where they should find themselves in the coming 2-5 years. The companies claim that the software can report comprehensively on any issues within two minutes. ChangeBase offers a software platform which automates the majority of the manual work done around application packaging/management. Symantec said that quality assurance is an essential process to ensure the smooth migration process, as 70 per cent of the time is spent fixing recurring problems found by installing...

Attune Systems, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class file virtualization solutions, today announced the Maestro Open Interface Format™, which offers software developers and partners the opportunity to benefit from Attune’s leading-edge file virtualization capabilities. By providing a simple text list of the file names to be migrated, developers and partners can now take advantage of the tiering and migrating features of the Attune Maestro File Manager™, which moves the data non-disruptively without any agents and without any tag files. “This new Attune announcement empowers third-party applications to non-disruptively tier and migrate user data, resulting in reduced backup windows, storage costs, and increased availability. It is all about having the right file in the right location at the right time,” said Alan Kessler, Attune’s president and CEO. “It is simple to integrate, even with in-house developed custom applications, and does not require writing to an API. All the developer ha...

I promised the CEO, Mike Maciag, not to push this news ahead of time, so I've waited. This obviously is a great boost for the Lab Manager. We need provisioning to get more robust and streamlined. Electric Cloud just brought that to VMware's Lab Manager. Here's the news: Integrated products deliver easy, flexible, self-service environment for the software development tasks of build, test & deploy MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif . – November 7, 2007 - - Electric Cloud®, the leading provider of Software Production Management (SPM) solutions, today announced an integration with VMware Lab Manager. VMware is the leader in virtualization software. Electric Cloud's ElectricCommander™ will be integrated with VMware Lab Manager to deliver dynamically provisioned virtual machines for the software build-test-deploy process. VMware Lab Manager automatically sets up and manages virtual machines and infrastructure, while ElectricCommander automates the software development processes t...

Building on its existing operations in China, storage company EMC said this week that it will increase its research and development spending to $1 billion through 2012. The investment amounts to double the $500 million commitment EMC made in 2006 as the firm's chief executive Joseph Tucci, in Beijing for the announcement, outlined a series of new ventures to be funded by the storage company. Officially opening its new R&D center in Beijing on Wednesday, EMC noted that the facility will complement its existing R&D operation in Shanghai. Located in an area in Beijing known as China's Silicon Valley, more than 200 engineers will work in the new R&D center and focus on EMC's core technologies including information storage, virtualization, security, resource management and content management and archiving. Another highlight of the center is its designation as EMC Research China; it is the first EMC research lab to be located outside of the United States. Link

I just had a pleasant chat with the CEO, Mike Maciag and the VP Software Development and talked extensively about the product "Electric Commander". This is an excellent product and can offer a lot in terms of product development and automation. So what can it do for you? ElectricCommander™ is an enterprise-class solution for software build management and build automation. It helps teams to make software build, package, test, and deployment tasks more repeatable, more visible, and more efficient. At its core, ElectricCommander is a Web-based system for automating and managing the build and release process. It provides a scalable solution to some of the biggest challenges of managing these "back end" software development tasks, including: Multiple, disconnected build and test systems across locations Home-built systems that are brittle, error-prone, and don't scale Slow overall build and release cycles ElectricCommander tackles these problems wit...

The SSE5 extensions to the X64 instruction set are much more important than the virtualization announcement, and both are unquestionably less important--at least for now--than getting a competitive quad-core processor out the door to compete with Intel. Just like AMD took the bull by the horns and added 64-bit memory extensions to the X86 architecture years ahead of Intel, with the SSE5 extensions AMD is going to take the SSE instruction set developed for 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors by Intel and extend them. The SSE5 specs are also being put out there for all to see, and they include special instructions for number-crunching, media processing, and memory operations that substantially speed up the performance of applications. SSE is Intelspeak for Streaming SIMD Extensions, and SIMD is short for Single Instruction Multiple Data. Intel introduced SSE in 1999 with its Pentium III processors, and it was a direct response to the multimedia extensions called 3DNow that AMD created f...

Well this blogger seems to guess, that it certainly will. Chambers (CEO, Cisco) will address the VMworld and will probably break this first collaboration *news* (chuckle) there. This may sound like a no-brain yawner, but it's quite profound...not just for Cisco, but for any of the switch vendors who want in on the lucrative virtualization market. For a quick refresher, let's review the concept of virtual switches (vSwitches). From VMware's definition: A virtual switch, vSwitch, works much like a physical Ethernet switch. It detects which virtual machines are logically connected to each of its virtual ports and uses that information to forward traffic to the correct virtual machines. A vSwitch can be connected to physical switches using physical Ethernet adapters, also referred to as uplink adapters, to join virtual networks with physical networks. This type of connection is similar to connecting physical switches together to create a larger network. Even though a vSwit...

Accentuating the ease of software delivery in large enterprises, VMLogix, a global provider of virtual infrastructure management technology to streamline the software development lifecycle, today announced the general availability of its flagship product, LabManager 3.0. With improved scalability, usability and broadened support for heterogeneous virtualization platforms and operating systems through product enhancements and strategic partnerships, VMLogix LabManager enables developers, testers and IT operations staff to deliver enterprise software quickly, reliably and cost-effectively. With the deployment of virtual labs expanding beyond the individual and group level, LabManager substantially streamlines processes across globally distributed application development and test teams by ensuring rapid, highly repeatable, resource-optimized deployments of complex, multi-machine build and test environments. VMLogix is the first to market with support for VMware ESX Server, Microsoft Virtu...

Good read this. Here are some suggestions for mitigating these risks: Keep up with security patches from VMware. Dedicate the physical host to the VMware-based lab; don't use the system for other purposes. Do not connect the physical laboratory system to your production network. Monitor the physical host with host-based intrusion detection (IDS) software, such as a file-integrity checker. Periodically re-image the physical host using cloning software, such as Norton Ghost. If this option is too slow, look to hardware modules, such as Core Restore, for undoing changes to the system's state. Check out the original article .