3Tera AppLogic Adds Windows Support

3Tera Inc. has released a beta version of its “grid operating system” software that supports Microsoft Windows Server, a step long sought by users, the company said. The company’s announcement came just hours after Amazon Web Services said that its EC2 platform would support Windows servers. A spokesman said 3Tera’s release of its AppLogic 2.4 beta “had been planned for some time.”

3Tera doesn’t host its own platform, but licenses its AppLogic software to hosting companies to build virtual private data centers that can power cloud applications. AppLogic, which allows companies to run applications in a scalable virtualized environment, previously had supported Linux, Sun’s Open Solaris and Solaris 10.

“Windows support is an important requirement for an open cloud computing environment robust enough to take on any Web or enterprise application,” said Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales and marketing, 3Tera Inc. “Solutions like .net, IIS, SQL Server and Exchange have made Windows a critical part of IT infrastructure.”

3Leaf Gets $35M Funding for I/O Virtualization

3Leaf Systems has received $35 million in Series C funding from a group of investors including LSI Corporation, Alloy Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Storm Ventures. 3Leaf will use the funding to speed the development of its virtualization technology and expand its sales and marketing operations.

3Leaf is among the new companies focusing on I/O virtualization for enterprise data centers. Virtualized input/output technology replaces network interface cards (NICs) and host bus adapters (HBAs) with virtual network and storage interfaces, making a single network connection appear to be multiple virtual NICs or HBAs.

VMworld: Cisco to Unveil Virtual Switch?

What will the headlines be at VMworld 2008, which begins today?The hottest chatter involves Cisco Systems (CSCO), which is expected to announce a virtual switch during its Tuesday keynote with VMware. It’s worth noting that the same reports were circulating in advance of VMworld 2007. But Christopher Hoff at Rational Survivability reports that the schwag bag for participants in Technology Exchange/Partner day includes a flyer on Cisco letterhead titled “Introducing Cisco’s Virtual Switch for VMware ESX” (link via the “other” Rich Miller).

VirtuaNews predicts that Cisco will introduce a new network technology called DVN (Distributed Virtual Networking) , a virtual networking management solution that will include a virtual switch named and networking tools for virtual machines.

Hot Spots in Motion

“The technology that delivers the most benefits for business but causes the most headaches for operation is virtual machine live migration,” writes Andreas Antonopoulos of Nemertes in a post titled “Dude, where’s my server?” An excerpt:

Live migration, also known as VMotion or XenMotion in the VMWare and Xen products respectively allows you to move virtual machines from physical server to physical server without any discernible interruption. … Wonderful features for business agility. But by making virtual machines mobile this feature makes troubleshooting even harder. Add the other features and you might have machines moving around automatically and constantly.

Andreas notes that tracking and managing VMs is critical to trouble-shooting. Moving virtual machines from server to server within a data center creates another challenge: as the computing load migrates, so does the heat load. A box that is underutilized one minute can become a high-density server in short order.

Live migration is one more technology that demonstrates the need for close cooperation between IT and facilities, and places a premium on monitoring and dynamic data center management. In most data centers, hot spots are difficult enough to manage when they’re standing still.

Virtualization Skills in High Demand

Virtualization skills are a hot commodity these days, reports Network World, which says the growing importance of virtualization in data center consolidation is boosting demand and salaries for IT workers with relevant experience. An excerpt:

Right now, virtualization skills are about twice as valuable as the average IT skill, salary research shows. The Foote Partners research firm tracks the market value of 164 IT certifications and 166 noncertified IT skills. The median pay for a noncertified IT skill, expressed as a percentage of base salary, is 8.3%. Virtualization skills are worth 16% of base salary, twice the typical value of an IT skill, according to David Foote, co-founder, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners.

Growing interest in storage virtualization is also prompting pay increases for workers with storage area network (SAN) expertise, according to Foote.

Virtualization 2.0: Beyond Server Consolidation

Do we need another “2.0″ technology? “Virtualization 2.0″ was the title of a session Tuesday at the IDG Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco. The panelists didn’t lay out any revolutionary definitions, as the main point of agreement was that it’s pretty much virtualization 1.0, only used in production rather than testing or quality assurance.

But the discussion highlighted how virtualization’s benefits for the data center can extend beyond current uses. “Most people who talk about virtualization are talking about server consolidation,” said Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing for StackSafe. “We see an opportunity to address deep problems in the IT world in a new way.”

That’s slowly convincing companies that equated virtualization with server consolidation to explore using virtualization for databases, security and storage as well as advanced testing, he said.

3Leaf Outlines Data Center Virtualization Strategy

3Leaf Systems is among the new companies focusing on next-generation virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers. Today 3Leaf has an announcement of its Virtual Compute Environment (VCE), a fully virtualized data center infrastructure. The company’s technology is interesting - its two-phase approach will allow companies to eventually virtualize memory, CPU, and I/O resources of standard X86 servers, providing the resulting resource pools with mainframe-like performance from commodity machines.

The strategy being announced today is not new, as virtually all components of 3Leaf’s approach to virtualization - including the Virtual Compute Environment - were discussed at length in Computer Business Review and StorageMojo in May 2007.

What’s new is the company’s ability to discuss its ambitions with clear road maps for working with both AMD and Intel technologies. 3Leaf has licensed AMD’s Coherent HyperTransport technology, and last week announced last week an agreement to license Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect technology.

Parallels Acquires ModernBill

Parallels said this week that it has acquired ModernGigabyte, LLC, maker of ModernBill automated billing system. The deal further strengthens Parallels market leadership in the hosting automation market, allowing it to bundle control panel and billing software in a single offering.

ModernGigabyte is based in Louisville, Kentucky and provides software to nearly 15,000 hosting resellers with over 2 million customers worldwide.

“Parallels’ acquisition of ModernGigabyte gives service providers a competitive edge by providing a complete hosting solution that integrates back-office software with Parallels control panels,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels (formerly SWsoft). “The acquisition also opens up new sales channels for software vendors that develop applications based on the APS Standard, which will drive greater adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.”

Egenera, Dell Partner on Data Center Virtualization

Back in October Egenera said it would make its data center virtualization software available on other vendors’ hardware platforms. The company’s PAN Manager software had previously been available only on Egenera’s BladeFrame hardware.

That strategy took a big step forward yesterday, when Egenera and Dell said the two companies intend to combine Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Infrastructure Consulting Services and Egenera’s PAN Manager data center virtualization software. The solution is designed to enable customers to simplify operations by creating and managing a single resource pool for both physical and virtualized servers.

“The Dell-Egenera relationship was driven by customer need for simple, agile and cost-effective solutions that virtualize and unify data center assets beyond a single server,” said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. “We’re driving to provide customers with a powerful, integrated way to manage server, network and storage assets, with lower operational costs, increased resource utilization and uptime.”

BMC Buys BladeLogic for $800 Million

Data center automation software provider BladeLogic (BLOG) has agreed to be acquired by BMC Software (BMC) for $28 a share, or approximately $800 million. The deal values BladeLogic above its IPO price of $17 a share when it went public in July and Friday’s closing price of $23.61, but slightly below the stock’s trading high of $31 a share in late December.

BMC’s move is the latest in a series of deals in which large players in the data center sector have acquired smaller firms with expertise in data center automation, most notably HP’s acquisition of Opsware for $1.6 billion.

“Organizations around the world will spend more than $140 billion dollars this year running data centers,” said Bob Beauchamp, BMC’s president and chief executive officer. “Automation is the only way IT can bring this spending under control and still meet the reliability and time-to-market requirements of their businesses. BMC’s acquisition of BladeLogic will create the new IT Service Automation leader, unique in its ability to provide these critical capabilities. It is a natural and very significant next step in our vision of Business Service Management.”