Gold/Platinum LEED Twinbill for Sabey

A view of bey.comthe Intergate.Columbia data center complex built by Sabey Corp. in Wenatchee, Washington.

Sabey Corp. has obtained a Gold LEED certification for the shell and core for Building B of its Intergate.Columbia  complex in Wenatchee, Wash., while tenant VMware has received a Platinum LEED certification for the critical infrastructure for its data center in building B.

Platinum is the highest rating possible under the LEED ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program for energy efficient buildings overseen by the US Green Building Council, while Gold is the second-highest rating. The VMware data center is one of just seven LEED Platinum data centers.

Building B at Intergate.Columbia is a 188,000 square foot facility supported by 22 megawatts of utility power. Sabey Construction was the general contractor for both VMware’s tenant improvements and for the core and shell.

Roundup: VMware, Akamai, Peak10, Raritan

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

VMware to Acquire Zimbra. Virtualization leader VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo Inc.  With over 55 million mailboxes, Zimbra products offer a full enterprise feature set to small and large environments, with on-premise or hosted service options.  “Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience,” said Brian Byun, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, VMware. Under terms of the agreement Yahoo! can continue to use Zimbra technology in services, but VMware will purchase the technology and intellectual property.  Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in 2007.  The acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010.  Financial details were not disclosed.

Akamai Implementation for Autotrader.com. Akamai Technologies announced that AutoTrader.com has implemented a number of Akamai services to support the growth of its online business.  Akamai said its Dynamic Site Accelerator and Web Application Accelerator have shown a 2X improvement in performance, enabling the site to load twice as fast as before and data center traffic offload exceeding 80 percent.  Mark Tuttle, Senior Manager of Engineering at AutoTrader.com said “having Akamai in place enables us to provide valuable information to our consumer quickly and reliably, without worrying about whether our infrastructure could scale to cope with the increasing user demands.”

Roundup: The VCE Alliance & Its Implications

The announcement of the Virtual Computing Environment and Acadia joint venture involving Cisco, VMware and EMC has triggered much discussion among analysts and bloggers, particularly about the competitive landscape and impact of the alliance on partner ecosystems. Here’s a roundup of notable analysis and commentary:

• First, some resources from the partnership. Chuck Hollis from EMC points to PrivateCloud.com, the new information hub created by the VCE partners. There’s also several posts on Cisco’s blogs. 
• Mark Bowker from Enterprise Strategy Group wonders whether IT will buy into the “shared vision” put forth by Cisco, EMC and VMware. “Vblocks are a great example of a platform that delivers a top to bottom, integrated solution to enable businesses to hit the ground running, but it remains to be seen if IT will consume infrastructure in this manner,” he writes. “IT is accustomed to procuring a bunch of individual pieces and bolting them together (sometimes with super glue and duct tape).”  
• The Cisco Subnet at Network World sees storms ahead. “The danger is that VMware may have wounded its relationships with HP, IBM and several other partners. Cisco already did that earlier this year when it rolled out UCS. If anything, the coalition has created even more division between data center compute, storage, networking – and now virtualization – vendors. Tensions mount with each partnership as groups of vendors mill around nervously, trash talking and brandishing their hardware and software.”
• Scott Lowe raises a number of questions about the alliance. Among them: “Does this new coalition signal a move away from the ‘arms-length’ relationship between EMC and VMware, a move that some (competitors, notably) have been talking about for some time? If so, what danger does that put VMware in with regards to storage relationships?”

Cisco, EMC, VMware Team on Private Clouds

An example Vblock infrastructure package will offer Cisco Unified Computing servers and MDS switches (in the two left-hand cabinets) and EMC Symmetrix-VMax hardware (at right).

Seeking to leverage the collective strength of their partner ecosystems to forge a leadership position in enterprise cloud computing,  Cisco, EMC and VMware are bundling their hardware and software in a turn-key solution for enterprise customers.

The three companies today outlined their shared vision for a Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) powered by an “infrastructure package” called Vblock. They also unveiled Acadia, a long-rumored joint venture to provide implementation services for private clouds built using Vblock.         

Vblock brings together Cisco’s Unified Computing System, EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and VMware’s VSphere platform in three packages that allow customers to run anywhere from 300 to 6,000 virtual servers. Vblock includes a security framework from RSA, which is owned by EMC.   

Roundup: VMware, Equinix, Limelight

Here’s a roundup of more news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• VMware Opens Washington Data Center.  Virtualization giant VMware announced Tuesday the opening of a new green IT data center in East Wenatchee, Washington.  VMware expects to save $5 million per year due to $4 million in energy savings and $1 million in location consolidation costs.  A LEED platinum certification from the Green Building Council is pending.  Green technologies employed at the Washington data center include Hydroelectric power, an economizer strategy to take advantage of free air cooling, containment methodology and virtualization technology (of course).  VMware is targeting a PUE of between 1.2 and 1.5. “By utilizing a non-proprietary datacenter design, the facility is one that virtually any enterprise or government agency can build,” said CIO Mark Egan. “And we are committed to using the lessons learned in the design and development of our datacenter to help our customers achieve similar benefits.”  Last May VMware bought a 5% stake in Terremark, who was featured in the keynote by VMware CEO Paul Maritz at VMWorld 2009.
• Equinix Develops Carrier-Neutral Ethernet Exchange.  At the ITU Telecom World 2009 conference in Geneva Equinix announced a global carrier-neutral Ethernet services platform, aimed at creating new and expanded Ethernet serivce opportunities for carriers.  Equinix has partnered with Alcatel-Lucent in this venture.  “Equinix’s new carrier neutral Ethernet exchange program is a natural extension of its existing IP interconnect offerings and gives a competitive edge to customers already interconnecting in Equinix POPs/carrier hotel locations,” said Alcatel-Lucent President Basil Alwan. The Equinix solution is designed to automate the process of interconnection agreements between carriers and enable them to seamlessly interconnect with multiple Ethernet carriers that have complimentary footprints through a centralized switching fabric.  Alcatel-Lucent recently had their next generation optical transport solution deployed by First Communicaitons, an integrated telecommunications carrier based in the Midwest.  The solution was a part of a DWDM high capacity, low latency network from Chicago to New Jersey.
• Limelight introduces next-generation global network. On Monday Limelight Networks introduced XD, the next generation of the company’s global network Platform.  Along with XD,  Limelight (LLNW) announced three new services that take advantage of Adaptive Intelligence to provide advanced levels of control, performance and insight into real-time delivery conditions. ”With XD, we are combining network innovations and advanced software to actively manage each object delivery in real-time on a per-connection basis, ensuring a brilliant user experience across a wide variety of devices, even under extreme and changing network conditions,” said Limelight co-founder and CTO Nathan Raciborski said

Roundup: DataPipe, Peak 10, Equinix, APC

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• DataPipe rolls out 3PAR services. Utility storage provider 3PAR announced Monday that Cloud-Agile partner DataPipe now offers differentiated virtual private array (VPA) and disaster recovery (DR) services as a part of their Stratosphere cloud services, which are powered by 3PAR Utility Storage.  DataPipe’s cloud platform leverages VMware and 3PAR to offer a managed, secure virtualized service. “We now have the opportunity to expand our cloud service offerings in the areas of security and compliance to increase the value we offer our customers,” said Michael Parks, Chief Technology Officer for DataPipe.  The 3PAR ASSURED product allows DataPipe to use remote copy, data replication, DR and automatic data backup to end users.  The 3PAR SECURED product offers isolated, secure virtual private array servies.
• Peak 10 deploys VMware vSphere 4.  Data center operator Peak 10 announced the delivery of Private Cloud Infrastructure Solutions, via VMware’s vSphere 4 platform.  The platform offers customers pools of virtualized resources that federate between on and off-premise environments on-demand and with ease.  By using vSphere 4 Peak 10 customers can maintain the integrity of their data and applications, while migrating to the cloud platform.  Peak 10’s leadership team are in San Francisco this week attending the VMworld 2009 conference.  Enhancements allowed from Peak 10’s vSphere 4 platform include twice as many virtual processors per virtual machine, four times the memory, three-times increase in network throughput, and additional SAN tiers available for high-end databases.

Roundup: VMware Buys SpringSource

The Facebook-FriendFeed deal wasn’t the only acquisition announced yesterday. Virtualization market leader VMware said it would buy SpringSource, an enterprise application management specialist. Here’s a roundup of notable analysis and commentary from around the Web:

• ReadWriteWeb: “It might seem strange for a company focused on cloud computing and virtualization to buy up one whose core is enterprise application management. But according to a blog post by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, the aim of this acquisition is to provide a comprehensive platform as a service (PaaS), which can be run either in datacenters or external service providers. In other words, VMware wants to place itself alongside platforms such as Force.com or the Google AppEngine, but with a stronger focus on enterprise applications.”
• The New York Times: “‘The role of the traditional operating system is changing,’ said Paul Maritz, the chief executive of VMware, during a conference call to discuss the deal. Mr. Maritz argued that software developers pay less attention to operating systems than they used to and focus instead on software development systems like SpringSource that help them write code. So, VMware wants to capture the attention of more developers and convince them to build in tools tied to its virtualization software. ‘Down the road, this will help transform VMware into being much more than it is today,’ Mr. Maritz said.”
• ComputerWorld: “‘VMware’s been moving beyond the hypervisor,’ said Maritz during a conference call Monday afternoon after the purchase was announced. ‘We want to make virtualization more application-aware … and the internal and external clouds significantly simpler to manage.’”

VMware Buys 5 Percent Stake in Terremark

Virtualization market leader VMware (VMW) will acquire a 5 percent equity stake in managed hosting provider Terremark Worldwide(TMRK) for $20 million, the two companies said today. Under the agreement, VMware will purchase 4 million shares of newly issued Terremark common stock at $5 per share. The investment is likely to raise Terremark’s profile as a provider of virtualization and cloud computing services. Shares of Terremark closed today’s session at $4.80 a share, up 44 cents for a gain of 7.3 percent.

“VMware has worked closely with Terremark for years, and during that time it has distinguished itself as a leader in delivering VMware virtualization, security, and business continuity to customers of all sizes and in all industries,” said Dan Chu, Vice President of Emerging Products and Markets. “This investment in Terremark underscores the importance of this partnership and our belief in their ability to leverage our technologies as part of the VMware vCloud initiative to develop reliable and scalable cloud computing solutions.”

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.