Andreessen-backed Startup Targets Cloud

A new cloud computing startup funded and advised by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz plans to help enterprise companies deploy and manage applications in the cloud. webappVM is a Redwood City company building a “self-monitoring application cloud” for web applications that will provide enterprise-style app management capabilities to public and private clouds. The company is backed Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures as well as Andreessen and Horowitz, who recently raised $300 million to fund early-stage investments.

webappVM was previously known as OSS-1701, and was founded in May 2008 by CEO Issac Roth and CTO Tobias Kunze Briseño. Roth most recently worked as director of product management at the Wily Computing business of Computer Associates, while Briseno was a senior development manager at Lycos Europe.

Web Host Hacked Via Virtualization Tool

Virtualization security risk is a topic that has often been discussed in worrisome “what if” scenarios. It looks like “what if” just became reality for customers of a UK web hosting company. The Register reported yesterday that VAserv.com was trying to recover 100,000 customer web sites that were wiped out when intruders gained root access to their system, apparently through a zero-day exploit in virtualization management software.

VAServ.com director Rus Foster told the Register that the company’s servers were exploited through a critical vulnerability in HyperVM, a virtualization application made by a company called LXLabs. Many of the deleted accounts were on an unmanaged service that didn’t provide backups. 

UPDATE: There’s a sad and shocking new twist. The head of HyperVM developer LXLabs has been found dead in a suspected suicide. The Times of India has an article on the death of LX Labs ownerKT Ligesh that suggests the executive may have been troubled about issues unrelated to the VAServ issue. Reuven Cohen shares some memories of Ligesh.

Read more about the VAserv story at The Registerfor more. For additional perspectives on virtualization-related security, see coverage at CNet , Network World and Burton Group.

Virtualization: The Recession-Proof Project?

The difficult economy has many IT managers playing defense, as companies cut costs and scrutinize every project. “All of the conversations in IT have shifted, and now have a financial component,” said Barb Goldworm, president of Focus Consulting. “Budgets are tight, and everyone has to have a business case. So IT has had to once again become conversant in financial metrics like TCO. If it’s not critical to your business, it’s getting put on hold.”

But it’s still possible to get approval for virtualization projects that can transform your IT operations, according to Goldworm, who spoke at last week’s Blade Systems Insight conference in Las Vegas. She said virtualization projects not only pay their way, but offer significant hero points for managers who can execute.

“Virtualization is one of those projects that is not getting back-burnered because it saves dollars,” said Goldworm. “This is the place where IT gets to be the good guys and contribute to the bottom line. This is where IT gets to change its perception in the organization.”

Roundup: VMware Launches VSphere 4

Virtualization market leader VMware (VMW) today unveiled VSphere 4, the cloud-focused next-generation of its infrastructure management software. VMWare describes VSphere as “the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud — a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service.”

“By giving IT organizations a non-disruptive path to cloud computing, we will be leading our customers on a journey that delivers value every step of the way, delivering up to an additional 30 percent cost reduction today while enabling IT to provide reliable and adaptable IT services.” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware.

Here’s a roundup of some of the analysis and commentary about VSphere 4.

• The Register: “The vSphere stack embodies a strategy and product set that VMware used to call the Virtual Data Center Operating System, or VDC-OS. Now, says Bogomil Balkansky, vice president of marketing at VMware, it goes by the name Cloud OS.”
• The Wall Street Journal: “VMware said that for large data centers, the new products will cost from $795 to $3,995 per server, depending on what features the customer wants. As part of the announcement, VMware said it is also selling a small-business product that Mr. Maritz called “always-on, IT in a box,” which permits a small business with just a few servers to create a virtual data center.”
• eWeek: “In short, VMware wants to become the system of choice to run enterprise data centers, and further, to enable these complex systems to reach out and touch others in order to gain business advantages.”
• Network World: “VSphere will let customers create a single computing pool consisting of as many as 32 physical servers and 2,048 processing cores, 1,280 virtual machines (VM), 32TB of RAM, 16 petabytes of storage and 8,000 network ports, according to VMware.”

For further reading, check out VMware’s VSphere resources and Webcasts, which links to lots more information.

The Challenges of Data Center Virtualization

Virtualization brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. For all its advantages though, virtualization also brings some unique challenges:

• Overall power consumption will be lower, but highly variable.
• There will be fewer servers, but each one will be more critical than ever.
• Applications can be dynamically reallocated at will, but the support infrastructure cannot do the same.
• The data center footprint will be smaller, but overall efficiency might still be suboptimal.

The good news is that there are practical and affordable ways to address these challenges and improve data center efficiency in the process. This paper from Eaton in the Data Center Knowledge White Paper Library looks at some of the power-related challenges and technologies that can address them.

Roundup: VMworld Europe 2009

Virtualization market leader VMware (VMW) is holding its VMworld Europe event in Cannes, France this week, where the company is discussing its vision for virtualization technology and the data center and cloud computing. Here’s a roundup of notable coverage and commentary:

• The Register’s big-picture summary describes the Cannes agenda as “VMware’s world takeover bid.” The company’s VSphere architecture includes “a set of interfaces looking downwards at the IT plumbing and another set looking at the applications. … In general IT resources are treated as things to scale up or down as required operationally.The vSphere product will be able to trace every instruction executed on every server in the data centre, providing an extremely granular record for security purposes and also, eventually, for billing purposes as VMware will add billing hooks to vSphere.”
• Network World looks beyond the features to the broader context of VMware’s push for a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), a software layer that aggregates virtualized servers, storage and network resources into one big computing pool. “VMware started talking about the VDC-OS last September and still has not announced a release date, but the company is providing further details on its capabilities this week,” Network World writes.
• But not enough details for some users, who want to know when to expect vSphere and how much it will cost. “But VMware CEO Paul Maritz was not forthcoming at the ‘VMware Unplugged’ session at VMworld Europe on Wednesday,” reports TechTarget.
• Virtualization.info looks at the Day 2 highlights, live-blogging the keynote from CTO Stephen Herrod, who discussed VCloud extension. “A customer using vSphere 4.0 can install the plug-in, log on the cloud service provider he has a contract with and simply drag his production virtual machine inside the cloud infrastructure that appears within the vCenter GUI,” writes Alessandro Perilli. “The VM will be automatically migrated inside the cloud without further intervention.” 
• Reuven Cohen at Elastic Vapor drills down into the new cloud capabilities. ” VMware is saying that its various management tools will only work on top of the VMware hypervisor,” he writes. “In other words, physical servers and servers virtualised by Microsoft, Citrix or any other vendor will not be compatible with the Vcloud initiative. Summarized, we’re interoperable as long as it’s VMWare.” 
• While it is introducing many new features of its software, VMware says it isn’t going to get into the cloud hosting business. That’s according to TechTarget, which had suggested in earlier reports that VMware’s lease of space in a huge Sabey Corp. data center in Quincy, Wash. meant that the company would offer hosting services. The company says the facility will be used for data center R&D .

Server Spending Slows, But Blades Benefit

Worldwide server unit shipments in the fourth quarter of 2008 declined 12 percent from a year earlier, while revenue was down 14 percent to $13.5 billion, according to new data from IDC.  “All server vendors, geographies, and technology segments were impacted significantly as the global recession gained momentum and market conditions weakened as the quarter progressed,” said Matthew Eastwood, group vice president of IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group. “It now appears the slowdown will worsen before any improvement is seen in late 2009 or early 2010.”

IBM maintained the lead in overall server market share with 36.3 percent, according to IDC, followed by HP (29.0 percent), Dell (10.6 percent) and Sun Microsystems (9.3 percent).

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.”