The Pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances Adds Technology

Management Expert to Corporate Team

PHD Virtual Technologies, award winning provider of esXpress VM Backup, the fastest multi-VM backup and restore solution on the market, today announced that Thomas Charlton has been appointed Chairman and CEO by the PHD Virtual board of directors. Charlton has more than 20 years of leadership experience in emerging technology ventures, leading past companies to increased profitability and successful acquisitions.

“We are pleased to add Thomas to PHD Virtual’s corporate structure,” said Michael Triplett, managing director, Insight Venture Partners and PHD Virtual board member. “Thomas brings a wealth of company management expertise and innovation to PHD Virtual from his years of experience.  His amazing track record in corporate growth and visionary thinking will help continue PHD Virtual’s dramatic growth.”

Prior to joining PHD Virtual, Charlton was the CEO of multiple software companies, including Shunra Software (network emulation and appliances), VoiceGenie Technologies (Voice XML speech platform) and Trailblazer Systems (eCommerce EDI software). Responsible for each company’s strategic direction, revenue growth, profitability and global expansion, Charlton led Shunra and VoiceGenie to profitability, and led VoiceGenie and Trailblazer Sytems to successful acquisitions by Alcatel and Nu Bridges respectively. Charlton also served as CEO at Tidal Software (enterprise job scheduling) which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc.

“I am excited about the opportunity that PHD Virtual represents based on the innovative technology it has built to address the growing data protection needs of the virtualization market,” said Charlton.  “Customers with virtualized environments cannot adequately protect their growing information through traditional data protection solutions. Virtual server environments need technology that has been purpose-built to meet the unique requirements of virtual machines. PHD Virtual is the only technology to be designed specifically for a virtual environment with the performance and scalability enterprise customers require. It also delivers the unique distinction as a virtual solution that integrates easily with a customers’ physical storage environment for true end-to-end data protection.”

About PHD Virtual Technologies
The fastest multi-VM backup on the market and pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances (VBAs), PHD Virtual Technologies has been transforming data protection for VMware since 2006. Its award-winning data protection solution, esXpress, is used today by more than 2,000 enterprises worldwide to achieve scalable, high availability and cost effective backup and restore solutions for VMware. esXpress was awarded Best of VMworld Finalist for 2009. In 2008, esXpress was named “Data Protection Product of the Year” by  SearchServerVirtualization.com.

PHD Virtual also provides a suite of free, virtualization utilities to assist with the administration and management of virtualized environments. PHD Virtual supports global resellers through its Channel Xpress partner program and is a proud VMware Technology Alliance Partner. For more information, please visit www.phdvirtual.com.

It’s now only two months until Citrix’s Synergy conference.

Synergy is the industry’s only conference focused on the growing convergence between virtualization, networking and cloud computing and how it can solve real business problems. It’s an open exchange of ideas, technology innovations and real-world experiences on how to deliver just about any desktop, application, media or service to any user, anywhere.

Synergy 2010 is a global conference featuring a two-event structure to cover North America in spring and Europe in autumn.

The spring event will take place May 12-14 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, California, a cosmopolitan city offering a wealth of cultural and recreational attractions.

The autumn event will be held October 6-7 at the Estrel Hotel and Convention Center in Berlin, Germany, one of the most interesting and exciting cities in all of Europe.

DataCore Software announced a few days ago that Lifeboat Distribution has honored them, presenting the company with Lifeboat’s coveted “Beacon Partner of the Year” award for 2009. Lifeboat Distribution is an international specialty software distributor for virtualization and other technically sophisticated products.

“In selecting DataCore Software as Lifeboat’s Beacon Partner for 2009, we recognize the strategic value that DataCore’s storage virtualization software brings to our reseller partners,” said Dan Jamieson, vice president and general manager, Lifeboat Distribution. “Simply put, DataCore completes the three dimensions of virtualization – desktops, servers, and storage – that value-added resellers and hosting providers require for total virtual solutions.”

Taking Virtualization to the 3rd Dimension

This announcement follows on the heels of VMware Partner Exchange 2010 in which a cadre of resellers and solution providers championed DataCore Software as the 3rd dimension to their Virtualization practice – heralding DataCore™ storage virtualization software as strategic to their server virtualization and desktop virtualization business. Link: DataCore Takes Virtualization to the 3rd Dimension.

By virtualizing disks across pools of tiered storage devices, DataCore storage virtualization software overcomes incompatibilities among different generations, models and manufacturers to maximize their combined value. The virtualization of storage is as important, financially and operationally, to a successful virtual infrastructure project as virtualization of servers and desktops.

“We are thrilled that Lifeboat Distribution has named DataCore Software its Beacon Partner for 2009,” commented Bettye Grant, VP of Americas Distribution Sales, DataCore Software. “What Lifeboat Distribution has recognized from working with virtualization resellers and solution providers is that DataCore storage virtualization software overcomes the major storage-related obstacles and upheaval that slow down or stop virtualization projects from getting off the ground or being successful when deploying a virtual infrastructure.”

Yesterday cravik1 postedon YouTube two preview videos of the upcoming VMware Guest Console Virtual Appliance.

The VMware Guest Console (VGC) is an application to manage the “Guest Operating Systems” installed on VMs. VGC includes a Unified Task Manager, Guest file system explorer, Snapshot Manager, VM Manager and more. VGC is supported with VMware Server and desktop products like vSphere, Server 2.0 and Workstation and can connect to multiple hosts simultaneously.

Article content sourced from cravik1’s YouTube channel & NTPro.nl

Last week, along with the acquisition of RTO Software assets, VMware also announced the acquisition of several assets from its parent company EMC.

The $200M deal includes Server Configuration Manager (formerly Configuresoft), FastScale, Application Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers), and Service Manager (formerly Infra), all parts of the EMC Ionix infrastructure management portfolio.

• Configuresoft, acquired in June 2009, was a configuration management company founded in 1999 (with the name of Fundamental Software) and originally focused on the physical layer. The firm shifted its attention to the virtual infrastructures and VMware only in early 2008.
• FastScale, acquired in August 2009, was a startup launched in 2007 and specialized in optimizing operating systems, deploying them on bare-metal hardware or virtual infrastructures, and managing them as a single application fabric.
  The firm originally promoted its capability to work with VMware infrastructures and then progressively exposed its support for the physical layer.
• nLayers, acquired in June 2006, was a startup founded in 2003 and focused on network discovery and performance troubleshooting.
  It primarily supported physical infrastructures and it’s easy to see similarities with VMware AppSpeed (which used to support physical hardware too – acquired from B-hive in May 2008).
• Infra, acquired in March 2008, was founded in 1991 and focused on Service Desk management (including Incident Management and Problem Management), Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management (including Federated CMDB), Availability Management and Service Level Management.

Exactly one year ago, virtualization.info suggested that VMware was slowly morphing into an infrastructure management company and that it would soon compete against BMC, CA, HP and IBM for the control of physical layer.

At that time, HP, which would be severely impacted by a direct competition with the virtualization vendor, somehow suggested that VMware is missing a universal configuration management database (UCMDB) to aspire to become an infrastructure management behemoth.
There we go: VMware now has the Infra one, courtesy of EMC.

Another interesting aspect of this deal is the fact that EMC is retaining control on the Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) that is being used to glue together the hypervisor, the network and the storage layers inside Vblocks, the VMware-Cisco-EMC approach to fabric computing.
VMware and EMC may have decided to exclude UIM from the deal to not further compromise the relationship with HP, but for how long this critical component will stay in EMC’s hands?

With the acquisition of Zimbra, back in January, VMware already started to advertise itself in a new way:
This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.
The acquisition of the EMC assets provides the final confirmation that VMware is getting ready to control the physical layer. And just in case it’s not clear enough, the company’s CEO Paul Maritz is explicit in the press announcement (our emphasis):
“Customers are increasingly leveraging virtualization as the foundation for modern IT architectures and their path to Cloud Computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware.  “Essential to this evolution is the ability to provide visibility and compliance from virtualized applications down to the underlying physical infrastructure.  The acquisition of these Ionix products and expertise promises to further establish VMware vCenter as the next generation management platform for private cloud infrastructures.”

The acquired EMC products and expertise will complement existing VMware development efforts and expand the VMware vCenter product family with capabilities to meet stringent compliance standards in a dynamic virtualized environment.  This new capability will provide a holistic view of configuration compliance of complete IT services from underlying physical assets to applications…
Additional reference to the physical layer can be found in this post from Ben Verghese, Chief Management Architect, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms Business Unit:
We recently announced the ConfigControl product that works closely with vCenter to provide configuration management and compliance to policies in highly dynamic virtualized environments. Ionix Server Configuration Manager enhances this functionality in two important ways. First, it adds visibility of the guest OS and application configuration on virtualized and non-virtualized servers. Second, it provides built-in capability for Compliance Reports ranging from the ESX hardening guide to HIPAA and PCI. The Ionix Application Discovery Manager product (formerly nLayers) automatically discovers complex applications with components on multiple servers, virtual and physical. The combination of these three products, when integration is complete, will give us comprehensive configuration and compliance capability across a broad domain with virtual infrastructure at the core, but extending to the adjacent areas of the OS, complex applications, and physical hardware if needed.
So basically it’s time to forget “VMware, the virtualization (and, by the way, cloud computing) company”.
In a very short time (probably no later than H1 2011) it will be “VMware, the infrastructure management company, from the bare-metal to the applications, off and on-premises”.

This will have immediate consequences on the relationship with HP, IBM and Dell. But more than that, it will greatly extend the competition between VMware and Microsoft.
It’s no more just about the hypervisor and the management capabilities that Virtual Machine Manager offers. This is going to threaten the whole System Center family and the market share that Microsoft has inside the datacenter.

post from Virtualization.info

Last June we wrote about Lanamark and well know Virtualization Gurus Xtravirt teaming up to provide a new level of Capacity Planning services.

Well Last week Lanamark announced they are working with Oracle to enable partners to use Lanamark Suite to perform capacity planning and deliver enterprise-class desktop and server virtualization solutions based on Oracle VM across x86/x64 and SPARC architectures. As part of this effort, Lanamark has joined the Oracle PartnerNetwork as a Gold level partner. You can find out more here: www.lanamark.com/oracle.

“Partners play a key role in delivering integrated IT solutions that enable customers to reduce IT costs and focus on their core business,” said Jeff Doolan, Director of Virtualization and Linux Channels at Oracle. “Lanamark’s solution accelerates our partners’ ability to plan and design complete virtualization solutions with Oracle VM across x86/x64 and SPARC systems.”

“Lanamark has a strategically important toolset which will enable Avnet’s Oracle channel partners to engage in early conversations with enterprises around desktop and server virtualization initiatives,” said Mickey Bharat, Director Oracle and Sun, Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA. “By working with Avnet and Lanamark, our partners can design end-to-end virtual infrastructure solutions that leverage the strength of complementary software and hardware products. These complete virtualization solutions create significant opportunities and business differentiators for Avnet’s Oracle partners.”

Lanamark Suite enables Oracle partners to accelerate design and delivery of Oracle VM virtualization solutions. Solution providers can gather vital information about x86/x64 and SPARC environments, identify most suitable candidates for virtualization, and then design complete, high-performance virtualization solutions with Oracle VM. Lanamark Suite supports application, middleware, database, operating system, server, storage and thin client components from Oracle and Oracle alliance partners. To learn more, including Lanamark’s participation in upcoming Oracle VM boot camps, please visit www.lanamark.com/oracle/bootcamps.

“Oracle enables its partners to deliver a complete stack with enterprise-class software and hardware components that can be deployed, managed and supported together,” said Mark Angelo, CEO of Lanamark. “Using Lanamark Suite, Oracle partners can analyze existing x86/x64 and SPARC environments, perform capacity planning and design end-to-end IT systems with highly available, scalable and cost-effective virtualization delivered by Oracle VM.”

On Wednesday VMware sent out an email to all customers regarding the end of availability for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB). The beginnng of the email reads:

This email prompted several blogger responses:

Rich Brambley said he would “go out on a limb and say that most of the VMware community will help VCB pack it’s bags as quick as possible”, also discussing whether VMware’s vDR will take the spotlight as VCB’s replacement?

Rich also noted that if vDR is destined to replace VCB then VMware is going to have to expand the scalability of vDR’s current combination of virtual appliance and vSphere Client plugin.

Read Rich’s full article here

Trilead has released the greatly improved VM Explorer 2.0! VM Explorer now supports VMware vCenter. This allows VM Explorer to keep track of your VMs even if they are moved to another host by DRS or vMotion.

VM Explorer now comes with revamped support for ESX 4.0/vSphere. We also perfected the interoperability of backups between ESX and ESXi. Starting from version 2.0 you can launch vSphere client from within VM Explorer. This enables you to directly login to one of your VMs. Moreover, a lot of minor bugs have been fixed.

All these features are available for the same price as before. The upgrade is free of charge for all customers with a valid subscription. VM Explorer is priced at USD 690 or EUR 490 respectively. Please note that you only need to license VM Explorer per installation (not per ESX host or per core).

You can download the latest version and try it for free from their website – a free trial key can also be requested.

http://www.trilead.com

Post sourced from NTpro.nl

esXpress and CloudArray software together provide businesses with an easy-to-use and economical solution for backup, recovery and data archive for virtualized and physical server environments.

What exactly does CloudArray deliver?

CloudArray provides an economical and highly reliable storage tier to applications. This storage tier has the same characteristics as local storage to include performance and security. For data protection applications such as esXpress, CloudArray serves as a target data repository. For companies that are using tape systems, they can now select CloudArray as the target backup device. CloudArray also serves as off-site storage to meet compliance requirements or for recovery. It eliminates all the logistics and cost typically associated with media transport or tape vaulting services.

CloudArray is a standalone software product that serves as a secure interface between server-based applications such as esXpress and Cloud storage. On the server end, it presents to applications CloudArray volumes via iSCSI (block storage). CloudArray volumes have user-defined policies for caching and replication. On the Cloud storage end, CloudArray interfaces with both private and public Cloud storage APIs without any changes to IT infrastructure or programming required.

CloudArray Packaging

CloudArray is available in several configurations to meet customer needs and requirements. It is available in a Virtual Appliance supporting VMware ESX/ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. It is also available in a Physical Appliance for customers that want a dedicated physical server to run CloudArray.

Data Availability and Security

For increased data protection, CloudArray offers data copy policies that replicate data across local storage and a variety of third party Cloud storage providers to ensure high data availability. It also compresses and encrypts data prior to transporting it to public Cloud storage to ensure data security and privacy. CloudArray leverages the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), adopted by the U.S. government and also used to secure top secret information.

Feature Highlights:

* Seamless integration with esXpress software
* Available in a virtual and physical appliance
* Data encrypted and compressed for data security and performance
* On-demand, dynamic data storage: scale up – provision new storage when needed, scale down if necessary
* Presents itself as a disk volume via iSCSI

Key Advantages:

* Increase speed of protecting data and completing backups
* Fast and reliable restores – eliminate data integrity challenges
* Reduce costs: media, tape storage & transportation
* Ideal for companies experiencing challenges with their tape library
* Significant cost savings over tape solutions, D2D backup and off-site tape storage
* Meets requirement for off-site data copies

PHD Virtual’s live webinar series will show how esXpress’ unique architecture gives their customers the ability to simultaneously backup or recover up to 16 VMs per host at once, making it the fastest Multi-VM B/R solution on the market. Click here for a schedule of upcoming live webinars.

The third annual Red Hat Partner Summit, an open source technology partner conference, will be arriving in Valencia May 2nd to 5th 2010.

This year’s Summit will strongly focus on the ecosystem and collaboration. The power of open source is evident in our partner ecosystem, share and leverage it at the event and benefit from joint Go-to-Market programs. At the Summit, Distributors, System Integrators, JBoss Partners, ISV’s, OEM’s, Resellers, Training Partners.