Nutanix goes Public

Nutanix is a provider of converged infrastructure, basically a physical server containing both compute and storage driven by an Installed Hypervisor of choice, this server, called a node can be stacked allowing storage to be shared in a single storage pool. Nutanix was founded in 2009 and since then was funded for a total of more than 312 million dollar. The latest funding round was in September last year where Nutanix raised 140 million dollar. Besides Nutanix also SimpliVity and VMware with its EVO:RAIL solution provide similar solutions.

Despite the rumors of its acquisition by Cisco and other statements made this May, today the company kicked off the process of going public. The initial public offering should be of about $200 million in shares, traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol NTNX. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are the lead underwriters of the deal.

As mentioned before Nutanix has long been expected to go public, but an official date isn’t available yet, given that we are at the end of the year we expect it to happen during the first IPO window of 2016.

WhatMatrix.com goes Live

virtualization.info has been following Virtualization Matrix since its early steps and we recently wrote about its crowdsourced-powered heir: WhatMatrix.

Today we are happy to report that its community, formed by a number of well known IT professionals, officially launched the website in GA.

WhatMatrix.com provides a comparison engine that, once populated with datapoints by its community members, offers the audience a tool to make IT purchase decisions, create solution proposals and perform technical product research. WhatMatrix currently include comparisons for the following areas: virtualization, Cloud Storage Gateways, End User Computing, Backup for Virtual Environments and SDS & HCI but, because of its crowdsourced, community base is actively seeking new members to further expand.

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Microsoft loves Red Hat: The business implications

As you may have heard, Microsoft recently announced its “historical” partnership with Red Hat, something that a number of analysts already claimed as a milestone for both companies but especially for their customers.

Although this partnership has been presented as a “cloud space deal” it touches a number of different technologies but, obviously, the most acclaimed news is the highly anticipated availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Microsoft’s public cloud offering Azure.

You can see that as a step forward towards an OS-agnostic Azure, but among the reasons behind this move there is that RHEL has been a first class citizen on AWS for a long time and because most enterprises are big shops of both Microsoft and Red Hat its absence has been highly noticed.

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Red Hat acquires Ansible

Today Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, provider of an IT automation tool popular especially within the developers’ community.

The acquisition is rumored to worth around $100M and expected to be closed by the end of this month.

Ansible is one of the four main players in the automation market, younger then the well known Chef and Puppet, has been launched in 2013 in Durham, N.C..

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Dell acquires EMC, owner of VMware and Pivotal

Dell today announced that it signed a definitive agreement to acquire EMC Corporation for a total of $67 billion, making it the largest ever acquisition in the technology industry so far. Until now the largest acquisition was the $ 37 billion Avago paid for chipset maker Broadcom in May this year. The transaction is expected to close in the second or third quarter of Dell’s fiscal year ending February 3, 2017.

EMC offers data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products. VMware, which is a subsidiary of EMC after it was acquired by EMC in December 2003, will remain an independent, publically-traded company allowing Dell to receive equity in order to finance the merger as suggested by Reuters. VMware stock went down around 10% showing both a low confidence in how Dell operates when it comes to VMware and a “technical” assessment due to the acquisition strategy that Dell will put in place (selling “tracking stock” to pay part of this acquisition).

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Red Hat announces earnings for Q2 2015

Red Hat announced its financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016.

Total revenue for the second quarter ended Augus 31, 2015 was $504 million, with an increase of 13% from the same quarter last year. Looking at the financial details we can see that total subscription revenue earned for the quarter was $363 million, with an increase of 9% year-over-year. Operating cash flow for second quarter was of $120 million, up 12% year-over-year, total cash and cash equivalents and investment was $2.0 billion after repurchising about $70 million.

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Citrix retires XenClient

Citrix on its website announced that it started the End-of-Life process of Citrix XenClient Enterprise, the end of life date will be December 12, 2016.

XenClient consists of two technologies, the XenClient, which is a type-1 client hypervisor running on selected hardware and the XenClient Enterprise Synchronizer, which allows XenClients to download centrally managed virtual desktops and run the locally. Synchronizer provides backup and restore, security policies and more.

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Release: Altaro VM Backup V6

Altaro Software, company specialized in backup for virtualized environments, specifically Microsoft Hyper-V, announced the release of Altaro VM Backup, previously known as Altaro Hyper-V Backup, rebranded to introduce VMware Hypervisors support from within the same application.

Altaro, founded in 2009, produces along with Altaro VM Backup also Oops! Backup and Backup FS, backup solutions for SMBs and home users. Oops! Backup is supposed to behave as as a ‘time machine’ for Windows, allowing users to preview and restore versions of their files from different points in time. Backup FS is a backup solution used by small and medium sized businesses looking to protect their Windows Servers and PCs from data loss.

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Release: VMware Workstation 12 Pro, Player 12, Fusion 8 and Fusion Pro 8

VMware today released version 12 of its type-2 client hypervisor products for Microsoft Windows: Workstation Pro and Player and version 8 of its client hypervisor products for Mac OSX: Fusion. All products mainly add support for running Windows 10.

Player (formerly Player Pro) is able to run VM’s only and can be used for personal use in an unlicensed way or licensed when used for business commercial use. Workstation provides the full functionality of the product. (see this page for a comparison between Player en Workstation) . The same goes for Fusion and Fusion pro, where Fusion provides less functionality as Fusion Pro. (see this page for a comparison between Fusion and Fusion pro), both Fusion as Fusion pro have to be licensed though.

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Release: Veeam Management Pack v8 for System Center

Veeam today released version 8.0 of its Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM or OpsMgr). Using this Management Pack customers running Operations Manager to monitor vSphere and Hyper-V virtualization platforms. Also monitoring for Veeam Backup and Replication is provided. Version 8 is the follow up of version 7 R2 which was released in December last year.

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