Category Archives: VMware

Cloud & IT Management, Log Insight, M&A Activity, Pattern Insight, Virtualization, VMware

Log Insight Acquired by VMware

Image representing Pattern Insight as depicted...Pattern Insight today announced that it has come to an agreement with VMware Inc. to sell its Log Insight product, together with its team and technology.

Log Insight is an analytics and log management platform that has the ability to analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real time. It is used for operational analytics in traditional data center and cloud environments. It has the ability to discover emerging patterns and guide administrators to the root cause of problems.

For more details, read this post by the founder of Pattern insight.

For one analysis of VMWare’s deeper move into cloud management, read this TechCrunch take on the acquisition.


IT Management, Tools, Virtual machine, Virtualization, VMware, VMware vSphere, vSphere

Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere available for download From 6fusion.

Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing  insight into resource consumption – for free right from the VMware console. In addition, new functionality was added to the latest version of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere based on feedback from beta customers, including:

  • Enhanced reporting capabilities such as viewing individual and summary
    VM profile reports
  • Usability and navigation enhancements such as sorting and managing
    profiles by Name, Free and Pro
  • The ability to upgrade from the Free to the Pro version of Cloud
    Resource Meter directly within the tool

Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere joins the existing family of 6fusion Cloud Resource Meter products, including Cloud Resource Meter for Linux and Cloud Resource Meter for Windows. You can see a demo of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere at 1PM ET on Wednesday, August 1st – register here.

“Cloud Resource Meter provides us a powerful and simple way to centralize and aggregate our customers usage information for billing and reporting of our Cloud Continuity services,” said Omar Torres, Director of Virtualization & Cloud Solutions at Veristor. “Through the secure, web-based console we are able to accurately track our customers usage without having to invest in and run our own metering infrastructure. This brings us a number of valuable efficiencies to how we operate and service our cloud customers.”

“6fusion believes metering IT consumption across heterogeneous environments is fundamental to optimizing any IT infrastructure,” said John Cowan, Co-Founder and CEO of 6fusion. “Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere gives organizations unprecedented insights into how their IT resources are actually being used, who is using those resources, and they can improve the business value they are delivering.”

Cloud Resource Meter is available in two models – Free and Pro. Cloud Resource Meter Free provides the ability to meter and view the last 28 days of data directly in the vSphere interface or in the 6fusion UC6 Console. The Pro version provides the full capabilities of the tool, including unlimited metering, expanded reporting capabilities, technical support as well as the ability to access 6fusion’s enhanced analytics tools.


BlueLock, Business Processes, Enterprise software, IT Management, Project management, Tools, VCloud, VMware, VMware vSphere

SpringBoard V5.5 Makes the Cloud More Efficient for Project Managers

LoadSpring Solutions, a provider of Project Management (PM) hosting and software, is introducing a new version of their SpringBoard cloud portal.

SpringBoard is a user-friendly control console that enables easy access to PM software and information that is hosted within LoadSpring’s cloud infrastructure. It connects project teams through any computer or mobile device worldwide.

The new SpringBoard 5.5 retains the same familiar look and feel as previous versions, but with improved tools and features that afford more functionality, speed and efficiency.

Launched on July 9th, these improvements will deliver broader enterprise access and greater data control, while helping users get more done in less time and with less effort.

According to Eric Leighton, LoadSpring’s founder and CEO, “Our enhanced control console will serve as a gateway to software resources and core LoadSpring services,” adding that, “The new features will further allow our enterprise-level customers to be more productive and efficient. SpringBoard 5.5 will even link users to our new LoadSpring Academy, transforming the way people are trained to maximize their use of new software.”

The upgraded portal is part of LoadSpring’s continuing pursuit of refinements that improve the customer experience and help them realize a quicker return on investment faster.

SpringBoard 5.5 is based on strengths that users value most in previous versions, such as:

  • Easy application and data access, anywhere, on any device
  • Software deployment in days, not weeks or months
  • Simple user scaling, both up and down
  • Fast global application upgrades and version changes
  • Safe, effortless migration of large amounts of data
  • Trouble-free, corporate-wide ID management
  • Disaster recovery with more Data Rescue options than ever
  • Enterprise-level security, support and service

 


DataCore, Hosting, IT Management, IT service management, Partnerships, service provider, Storage hypervisor, Storage virtualization, VMware

DataCore Software Announces Pay-as-You-Serve Cloud Service Provider Program for Hosted IT Services

DataCore Software today announced that providers of hosted IT services may now rent DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor through the company’s Cloud Service Provider Program. Under the program, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) pay for the use of the software monthly based on the amount of storage they serve versus having to purchase it outright. This allows participating providers to reduce capital expenditure and better align costs to revenue.

DataCore’s storage hypervisor software manages and protects hosted IT environments, providing a high performance, highly scalable, automatically tiered storage infrastructure upon which providers can confidently build and offer their hosted IT services.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program goes a step further in the direction of “on demand” infrastructure with its “Pay-as-You-Serve” proposition to hosted IT service providers—they pay for the software as they use it, based upon the storage they serve to their subscribers.

“In order to offer the most competitive pricing for their services, CSPs and other hosting companies seek to lower capital expenditures and keep expenses and their timing aligned to revenue-producing activities,” said Carlos M. Carreras, vice president of alliances and business development, DataCore Software. “The DataCore storage hypervisor ‘software advantage’ gives us the unique ability to offer the kind of service provider program that other leading software companies, like VMware, have developed, but apply it to the storage-side of the infrastructure. Ideally tailored for the flexibility, efficiency and predictable expenses they seek.”

New cutting edge technologies will also be of interest to CSPs. These innovations designed to satisfy large scale, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) requirements crucial to building robust cloud storage infrastructures are packaged in the company’s newest product, SANsymphony-V R9.0, aptly described as “The Storage Hypervisor for the Cloud.”

The storage hypervisor’s powerful storage management capabilities and interchangeable hardware design empowers hosters with great cost-savings flexibility, new levels of automation for increased resource productivity and a storage infrastructure that easily incorporates the industry’s latest innovations.

“The new DataCore CSP pricing model reduces our upfront costs – thereby enhancing our margins,” comments Philippe Merckel, CEO, MERCKEL SAS. “DataCore understands that as data centers move to the cloud in the form of virtual, private data centers, cloud platforms need the storage virtualization functionality that DataCore brings to the table with its storage hypervisor. The key, however, for CSPs lies in making the adoption of this technology cost-effective. That is what this Cloud Service Provider Program does. It makes it far easier for us to standardize on DataCore for storage virtualization because we pay as we go rather than paying for everything upfront. It fundamentally suits our own business model whereby our own clients lease our cloud platform.

The DataCore Cloud Service Provider Program is currently open only to providers of hosted IT services located in Europe; the program will be expanded to include North America and additional geographies over the next 90 days. For more up-to-date information about program eligibility and the program itself, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/Partners/cloud-service-providers/CSP-Program.aspx.


Actifio, Data management, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, VMware

Actifio Announces PAS 5.0, Radically Simple Copy Data Management

Actifio today launched PAS 5.0, a major platform upgrade that extends the company’s signature capability – the ability to recover any application instantly for up to 90 percent less total cost of ownership (TCO) – to large scale enterprises and cloud service providers. This new version of its Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform – a proven virtualized storage solution with more than 100 users worldwide – addresses more deployment scenarios by delivering new cloud-based services including multi-tenancy, networking optimization and reporting capabilities. It also offers improved workflow to accelerate application development lifecycles, now including Oracle, with efficient self-service database cloning to lower test/development storage costs across large enterprises.

PAS has disrupted the enterprise storage industry by transforming its underlying economics with a purpose-built system optimized for the real driver of today’s data storage explosion: copy data. By focusing on smarter and more efficient copy data management – where it is not unusual for a business to maintain 13-120 redundant copies of production data – Actifio provides faster recovery and more reliable data protection for up to 90 percent less cost than traditional backup and recovery point tools.

“The copy data explosion is creating significant problems for the enterprise and the reason is that a whole slew of traditional, expensive and siloed data backup and recovery applications can’t instantly find, manage and protect ever-increasing data assets,” Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “With PAS 5.0, enterprises can create and maintain a single copy of everything in their production environment, eliminating the need for multiple redundant copies. It also recovers data within seconds, which is more important than ever in mission-critical environments.”

Through Actifio’s radical simplification of the copy data management problem, organizations are freed to reinvest dollars often counted in the millions of annually recurring expenses into more strategic IT initiatives driving growth and innovation. PAS users – including Boston University Medical Campus; Audax Group; NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable Company; City of South Portland; and Jones & Bartlett Learning – are already realizing such savings and putting those resources to better use inside their own organizations.

“Finding ways to extend our current IT investments into new areas can make a good technology decision a great technology decision,” said Erik Dubovik, vice president of IT, Audax Group. “This is exactly the case with PAS 5.0 because it lets me simplify copy data management for more of our environment in addition to lowering test and development storage costs by 95 percent.”

“Our work in the fight against disease is essential but it generates unwieldy ‘Big Data’ that’s hard to store, share and protect using conventional tools,” said Dr. John Meyers, assistant professor of medicine and director of technology for the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “PAS 5.0 will let us recover anything, physical or virtual, across our entire data center – instantly – with a single solution with 80 percent less dedicated backup storage. For us, that will save time, money and trouble – and allow us to focus on the advancement of science.”

This new release coincides with the accelerating worldwide adoption of PAS, which has been installed by hundreds of customers and sold by more than 120 value added resellers worldwide. This momentum has enabled Actifio to double revenues for seven consecutive quarters and expand in key regions across Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Middle East. It has also resulted in tremendous industry-wide acclaim for Actifio, which was recently chosen as one of Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies1 for 2012.

The new PAS 5.0 supports larger deployments and more diverse enterprises while accelerating the test and development process in Oracle environments. Actifio has significantly bolstered the scalability and performance of PAS 5.0 with these powerful new features:

  • 200 percent dedupe capacity increase
  • 2x increase in throughput
  • 10x bandwidth increase with 10GbE
  • 75 percent network bandwidth savings with DeDup Async™ replication
  • Faster on-boarding of remote applications via portable storage
  • Actifio Enterprise Manager – a new software capability that enables
    simple management of large scale PAS deployments

PAS 5.0 gives developers and IT teams copies of production data within minutes to dramatically hasten the arduous testing process. Within Oracle Test and Development environments, PAS 5.0 eliminates more than 95 percent of storage costs by creating multiple copies at a fraction of footprint. Actifio now enables immediate self-service database cloning – taking less than 15 minutes to clone a five terabyte database when it previously took several days using legacy approaches.

For cloud service providers, PAS 5.0 offers a wealth of public and private cloud data management services including backup, remote backup, and test and development. It also provides several new, in-demand features including DeDup Async, secure multi-tenancy and the Actifio Enterprise Reporter.

This new version of PAS now supports a wider variety of environments – including all file system data on Windows and Linux including DAS, NAS and SAN. It provides comprehensive protection and availability for heterogeneous networked and direct-attached server environments, supporting a range of in-band, out-of-band, physical, VMware, structured and unstructured environments.

Additional Multimedia Assets

  • [Video] – Solving
    the Big Data Problem with Actifio
  • [Video] – Boston
    University: Discovering Effective Big Data Management with Actifio
  • [Video] – NaviSite:
    Delivering the Economic Promise of Cloud Backup with Actifio
  • [Video] – Accelerated
    Oracle App Development, Protection & Delivery with Actifio PAS 5.0

PAS 5.0 will be available the week of June 18.  Contact info@actifio.com for more information.


Data center, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Green Cloud, Venture Funding, Virtualization, VMware

Green Cloud Technologies Gets $2,750,000 for Data Center Expansion

Green Cloud Technologies, a Cloud-based technology solutions provider headquartered in Greenville, SC, has concluded a $2,750,000 round of financing that is a mix of Series B Preferred Units and three-year Convertible Notes. The bulk of the financing comes from Millry Corporation, a 70-year-old Incumbent Local Telephone Carrier serving southwestern Alabama. The additional financing will be used for market expansion and the build-out of the company’s second data center facility in Nashville, TN. Green Cloud previously secured $1,250,000 through the sale of Series A units in 2011.

“This is another vote of confidence for Green Cloud’s strategy from a very savvy and experienced investor group,” said Shaler P. Houser, CEO of Green Cloud. “This financing further enables Green Cloud to help businesses transition to our secure, reliable, and robust Cloud-based infrastructure and increase the efficiency and performance of their businesses.”

Green Cloud’s offerings include VMware-based Virtual Servers, Mirror-Imaged Disaster Recovery, and Hosted Telephone Services.

“We are excited about the opportunity to invest in this area of communications,” added Paul Brown, president of Millry Corporation. “Since 1941, we as a company and family have invested directly in local telephone service, Internet access, cellular telephone service, and wireless digital voice/data services and continue today to search for product offerings that will be required for the marketplace. The platform and services that are being offered by Green Cloud are the latest evolution in the industry and will attract business clients through cost savings and, more specifically, customer service. We look forward to the growth of Green Cloud as its CEO and employees concentrate on providing a best-in-market service offering.”

Green Cloud recently announced expansion plans into the Myrtle Beach – Charleston – Savannah corridor and the Huntsville –Nashville – Chattanooga area. The company is 100% dedicated to Authorized Partner distribution and uses no direct sales force. By partnering with local consultants, IT managed service providers, and PBX distributors, Green Cloud enables its partners to leverage the benefits of Cloud technologies without making the substantial investments necessary to deploy fully-redundant Cloud services.


Amazon Web Service, Appcara, Application programming interface, Enterprise software, IT Management, Rackspace, VCloud, VMware

Appcara Debuts Its AppStack Release 2 Platform, A Dynamic Application Layer Above the Cloud

Appcara, maker of cloud application lifecycle solutions, announced a major new version of its AppStack application and portability platform that helps enterprises and service providers accelerate complex applications into the cloud and deliver new application-based revenue sources. Incorporating a real time Dynamic Application Environment layer that eliminates the need for server templates or scripting, AppStack Release 2 changes the rules of cloud computing. With AppStack 2, enterprises and service providers gain exceptionally fast time-to-market for key business applications – maximizing time, knowledge and profitability.

While cloud deployments are common for simple web apps, the $385 billion enterprise application market remains the province of on-premises data centers, in large part because IT staffs lack the tools required to truly govern VMware, Citrix, or other private and hybrid applications running on Amazon Web Services, Citrix CloudStack or VMware vCloud. While cloud app management solutions exist, they require deep technical knowledge of application stacks, and a lot of manual, error-prone effort to use.

AppStack provides an advanced application layer above public and private clouds – to capture application components, configurations and dependencies in real-time in the industry’s only dynamic Configuration Repository – thereby automating all aspects of the application lifecycle. By decoupling apps from low-level dependencies such as operating systems and machine images into its uniquely visual, intuitive, real time environment, AppStack 2 enables total application portability, even across different public clouds – for instance, from Amazon to Rackspace – as well as from public to private clouds. AppStack allows cloud computing to expand beyond simple, predefined workloads, and into the realm of serious enterprise applications – with a single pane of glass management interface, and eliminating vendor lock-in.

“For a long time enterprises have been seeking to leverage cloud environments for more complex business applications and take advantage of the flexibility, faster time to market and markedly lower cost structures delivered by the cloud. AppStack’s ability to capture and assemble these application graphically, in real-time, is something that’s businesses can truly leverage for improved efficiency and faster time to market,” said William Fellows, analyst at 451 Research.

A major new capability in AppStack 2 is the App Marketplace functionality that connects application publishers and consumers and provides a platform to enable usage-based applications, so that:

  • Corporations have immediate access to business applications, enabling
    them to integrate applications without the need to purchase, install &
    configure apps as with packaged software.
  • ISV’s can readily publish business applications for usage-based
    consumption
  • Distributors can resell applications in a usage-based model in the
    cloud, and to move away from traditional box-based software sales.

“Many of our clients come from the Life Sciences industry where they have very sophisticated, mission critical applications running on their servers. Making a move to the cloud wasn’t an option worth considering until the AppStack solution came along,” said Tim Caulfield, chief executive officer at American Internet Services (AIS). “The idea that AppStack can do the heavy lifting on the back-end and provide the user with a very clean, single-pane-of-glass interface, is quite appealing and fits nicely with our BusinessCloud1 offering.”

AppStack 2 builds upon existing AppStack patent-pending components that have been in use by service providers and enterprise customers, including:

  • Dynamic Application Engine – which
    captures user-defined app environments, settings and relationships in
    real-time, construct data models and insert into Configuration
    Repository. It automates provisioning, lifecycle management, and
    portability.
  • Configuration Repository – which stores
    application settings, dependencies and change records for all
    application workloads. This enables speedy provisioning of application
    workloads as well as the ability to de-couple lower level components
    such as operating systems for portability across cloud vendors.
  • Cloud Target Optimizer – which maps
    provisioning elements and instructions to vendor specific API’s and
    available capabilities.

“Enterprises need to get critical apps to market with the least effort and cost possible, and the solutions on the market today help with only simple, static environments,” said John Yung, founder and CEO of Appcara. “AppStack keeps it simple, fast, and visual to deploy and manage even complex applications in the cloud, so customers and service providers can lower their IT costs – even with enterprise applications – and focus on scaling their business.”

AppStack Release 2 will ship in July 2012. Appcara is showcasing its latest version of AppStack at Cloud Computing Expo New York, in its booth #257.


Computer Hardware, Data center, Hardware, InfiniBand, Mellanox, Mellanox Technologies, Virtualization, VMware, VMware vSphere

Mellanox Releases InfiniBand Driver for VMware vSphere

Image representing Mellanox Technologies as de...Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced the availability of InfiniBand driver support for VMware vSphere® 5, providing IT end-users the compelling choice of deploying field proven InfiniBand-based interconnect in virtualized data center and cloud environments. Running with Mellanox’s industry-leading ConnectX®-3 FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapter cards and SwitchX® FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand switches, the InfiniBand software driver for VMware vSphere 5 helps bring high throughput and low latency to virtualized IT deployments.

The InfiniBand driver for VMware vSphere 5 along with features like VMware VMDirect Path I/O, vMotion® and VMware High Availability (HA), leverage InfiniBand’s advanced built-in reliability and performance capabilities to help bring high performance and cost-effective solutions to IT end-users.

“Virtualization is proven to be the most effective technology to drive lower data center total cost of ownership and improve the cost-effectiveness of cloud computing SLA,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s InfiniBand driver leverages the advanced data center virtualization and high availability features of VMware vSphere 5 to help bring new cost-effective system architectures for the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.”

 


6fusion, IT Management, Virtualization, VMware, VMware vSphere

6fusion Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere Now in Public Beta

Image representing 6fusion as depicted in Crun...

6fusion, a provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved public beta and is now available for sign up. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing unparalleled insight into resource consumption – all for free and all right from the VMware Console. Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere product joins the existing family of Cloud Resource Meter for Windows, and Cloud Resource Meter for Linux already available from 6fusion.

“Utility metering with the Cloud Resource Meter gives us the ability to profile our environment in a way we never have before,” said Graham Brown, Director, Business Technology Consulting, Gyrocom, “which gives us accurate data to make informed decisions on workload allocation and deployment.”

Using 6fusion’s unique Workload Allocation Cube technology with a connection to the UC6 Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Meter provides an industry standard unit of measurement allowing you to meter resource consumption across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. This standardized approach to metering allows IT departments to improve ROI analysis, optimize resource consumption, build the business case to migrate to cloud, or simply improve IT distribution processes.

“Universal metering is foundational to any utility,” said John Cowan, 6fusion Co-founder and CEO. “Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows any VMware user in the world to quantify their cloud requirements and determine the best location to run those workloads going forward – maximizing efficiency of IT spend and ROI.“

Cloud Resource Meter is available in two models – Free and Pro. Cloud Resource Meter Free provides the ability to meter and view the last 28 days of data directly in the vSphere interface or in the 6fusion UC6 Console. The Pro version provides the full capabilities of the tool, including unlimited metering, expanded reporting capabilities, technical support as well as the ability to access 6fusion’s enhanced analytics tools.

To learn more about Cloud Resource Meter or to sign up for access to the beta product, visit www.6fusion.com/products/cloudresourcemeter, or stop by booth 618 at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco or booth 311 at Interop Las Vegas.