Surgient secures new patents for VM lifecycle management

Hardware virtualization allows an unprecedented level of flexibility in modern datacenters which can be combined with many degrees of automation. Depending on the purpose this automation is shaped in different tools for different markets.

The very first application has been the so called Virtual Lab Management, a segment where VMware, Surgient and VMLogix are busy today. But a second one is emerging these days: the VM lifecycle management.

On the long term it’s easy to imagine how the today’s Virtual Lab Mangement vendors will start offering VM Lifecycle Management solutions and vice versa.

A recent set of patents secured by Surgient seems to confirm this vision:

Surgient, the market leader in virtual labs that power solutions for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Reinforcing its technical leadership in the virtual lab management market, the three new patents cover technologies that enable Surgient customers to better allocate, manage and organize virtualized resources used to accelerate the software development and delivery lifecycle.

The three patents were awarded during the past year. The technologies covered by the patents were developed entirely by Surgient’s research and development team. The patents include:

  • US Patent #6,990,666
    “Near Online Server”-Describes a method for providing fractional burst capacity in delivering virtual computing resources from a centralized, shared server resource pool.
  • US Patent #7,257,584
    “Server File Management”-Describes a method for providing portability of virtual server “snapshots” across physical server hosts. One of the underpinnings of Surgient’s library management server, this patented technology provides greater flexibility when developing, managing and deploying virtual machine images.
  • US Patent #7,287,186
    “Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster”-Describes a method for organizing virtual machine resources for rapid recovery, such as that required by advanced disaster recovery, reduced power consumption or business continuity scenarios. Enables virtual machines to dynamically move across physical hosts without requiring data to be moved or copied.