Year: 2009

After over one year of development, started after the company changed its identity from InovaWave to Hyper9, the first product of this reborn startup is ready.

The actual name of this solution is unclear. In one of the previous news from the company it seemed to be called VI Search and Analytics, but now the entire marketing literature just reports Hyper9 everywhere.

Whatever the product is called, it is a search engine that integrates with vCenter and indexes the information stored inside the VMware Infrastructure inventory.
Once the index is build, Hyper9 allows to find any detail about your virtual infrastructure (VMs, virtual networks, data stores, applications inside the Guest OSes, etc.) through a search engine interface that is much more similar to Splunk than to Google.

Once the administrator receives the Splunk-like results he can save his query, share it with other co-workers or further filter the obtained data by comparing the results with the ones received a previous day, or the ones coming from a completely different query.

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While everybody waits to know if IBM will swallow Sun, Sun continues to execute its (controversial) virtualization strategy.
The third version of its VDI connection broker, simply called VDI, is finally ready.

Announced in January, as expected the product introduces support for xVM VirtualBox, the hosted VMM that Sun acquired from innotek in February 2008.

As previously highlighted, it’s unclear why Sun believes that its customers may want to run a resource hog like a virtual desktop infrastructure on top of a platform that is much slower than a hypervisor.
The reason can’t be the price: even if VirtualBox is free there are several free hypevisors available at this point.

Anyway there are other features that are more interesting:

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In January 2008 a new startup entered the Virtual Lab Automation market segment: StackSafe (see virtualization.info coverage here).

The company was founded in 2005 with the former name of Revive Systems. It took three years to develop and launch a Xen-based solution to compete against VMware, Surgient, VMLogix and the other VLA companies that arrived later (like Skytap).

A little more than a year ago StackSafe showed a solid leadership team with a strong background on security, as some of the executives were coming from Symantec and Counter Pane.
Now the Board of Directors page only lists the CEO, Loren Burnett, along with the startup funders: Roger Novak, of Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Matthew McCooe, of Chart Venture Partners.

In over twelve months (or over four years, depending on they way you count) the company didn’t impress much for its activity and the virtualization community is barely aware of its Test Center product.
Maybe the funders are looking for a leadership replacement?

Update: It seems that StackSafe planned to raise a Series B funding of $10 Million in 2008 (half of them would be provided by the current investors) but couldn’t succeed.
This may imply that the company is simply running out of money.

In November 2008 Reflex Systems (formerly known as Reflex Security) completely changed its focus on virtualization, moving from security to management, and its market strategy.

To sell the new product, Virtualization Management Center (VMC), they also need a new Vice President of Sales: Preston Futrell.

Futrell was the Director of Services Sales in ISS before the security firm was acquired by IBM in 2006.

Maybe Reflex Systems decided for Futrell in the hope that his credibility in the security world will provide a last chance to sell the Virtual Security Appliance (VSA).

Just last month Neocleus hired the former President of Product Management & Marketing at Softricity, Bill Corrigan.
This month instead the company appoints an RSA executive to its Board of Directors: Dennis Hoffman.

Hoffman is the Vice President and General Manager of Data Security at RSA, which is a subsidiary of EMC.

The strong background in security is not really a surprise: the startup leadership comes from well-known security firms like BeeFence, Check Point, Entercept (acquired by McAfee), SofaWare.

Nonetheless this subtle link with EMC is interesting.
Neocleus is about to release its client hypervisor based on Xen (probably beating on time Citrix, VMware, and a number of other startups).
One may think that they are trying to attract the attention of VMware (which is another EMC subsidiary) but EMC swore endless times that its subsidiaries are totally independent and don’t receive any pressure from the parent company. It’s just a matter to believe so.

Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is bidding to acquire Sun.

Many believes that IBM may want Sun to consolidate its position in the virtualization and cloud computing space before Cisco Systems gets any market share with its upcoming Unified Computing System. But the Cisco involvement in this bid be be much deeper than that.

Several rumors (none of them coming from trusted virtualization.info sources anyway) suggest that Cisco was already in discussion to acquire Sun before IBM came in.

Many have spotted a similarity between the Sun server chassis and the new Cisco UCS chassis (here an example) and started wondering if between the two have an OEM agreement in place to manufacture the UCS hardware.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is in acquisition talk with Sun and considering the source this is very unlikely just a rumor:

If the deal does go through, which could happen as early as this week, IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Sun, the people said. That would translate into a premium of more than 100% over Sun’s closing price Tuesday.

The impact of such merge would be huge. Of course the big question is what will happen to the many overlapping business units and offerings (servers, storage, management software).

One of the things that IBM may want to save of the current Sun identity is the upcoming and so much delayed server virtualization portfolio dubbed xVM, which includes a bare-metal hypervisor based on Xen (xVM Server), an enterprise management console that can perform VMs live migrations and resource pooling (xVM Ops Center), a VDI connection broker (xVM VDI), a hosted virtualization product (xVM VirtualBox) and a cloud computing facility that can rival with Amazon EC2 (depending on the recently acquired Q-Layer technology).

So far IBM has been happy in its role of virtualization distributor, despite the company invented the technology in the ‘60s. But Cisco is invading the server space and has a relevant interest in VMware. Not enough to buy the virtualization vendor but enough to keep a leadership position in the fastest growing IT market today.

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At the beginning of this week Cisco finally announced its long awaited blade system once known as California.

The company unveiled an impressive list of partners (VMware, EMC and BMC are the key ones) that will provide the building blocks of this new platform called Unified Computing System (UCS), and provided some scarce information about some of its hardware components. But it didn’t unveil anything about the most important part of the system: its control center, the UCS Manager, that will have to integrate everything in a seamless way.

Anyway in the last three days a lot of information about the platform were leaked.

Scott Lowe summarizes some of them in his last post:

…there are three different CNA families targeted at different markets: high-performance Ethernet, compatibility with existing driver stacks, and virtualization.

…

[the virtualization CNA] will utilize SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), a PCI SIG standard for allowing a physical network adapter to present multiple virtual adapters to upper-level software, in this case the hypervisor. This eliminates the need for the hypervisor to manage the physical network adapter and allows VMs to attach directly to one of the SR-IOV virtual adapters.

It will utilize Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (Intel I/OAT) to minimize bottlenecks in the hardware and allow the server to better cope with massive dataflows like those generated by 10GbE adapters.

It will use Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) to improve traffic management within the server and decrease the processing burden on the VMM, i.e., the hypervisor…

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VKernel continues to release little, useful and often free tools for the virtualization community, mimicking the successful marketing approach of Veeam in its early days.

This time the startup launches SnapshotMyVM, a simple utility to automatically document the details (and the performance history) of any VMware Infrastructure 3.5 virtual machine.

The product interacts with vCenter and allows the administrator to select one or more VMs at the same time.
As soon as the process starts, SnapshotMyVM collects all the VM details and populates a report that can be manually modified to improve its accuracy and then exported in XML format.

At that point the report can be imported inside Microsoft Excel or any other tool that can read and manipulate XML sources:

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It’s nice to see that Leostream is finally taking a new direction. Their flagship product is still seriously in need of a major upgrade after one year and a half of hibernation but at least the company is closing new valuable partnerships every two months or so:

• a reseller agreement with IBM in September 2008
• a technology partnership with eG Innovations in October 2008
• an OEM deal with BOSaNOVA in February 2009

and now another technology partnership with NoMachine, to support their NX remote protocol on Connection Broker. 

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