Year: 2011

On the 28th of December last year we received a message from Twitter Trust and Safety, stating that they renamed the @govirtual Twitter handle to @govirtual_ because another company, govirtual.tv (a company which seems to provide courses for VMware) claimed the @govirtual handle. This was done without any notice from Twitter beforehand . After that, we made several attempts to contact Twitter, but they didn’t respond so far.

That’s why we’ve decided to rename our Twitter handle to @virtinfo for virtualization.info and @cloudcompinfo for cloudcomputing.info. If you are already following us, you don’t have to do anything, this change will automatically be ported to your account. The links on our websites have been updated to reflect these changes as well.

We want to clearly state that virtualization.info is not connected to govirtual.tv and its claimed Twitter handle @govirtual in any way.

Convirture, which provides an open source management console supporting Xen and KVM hypervisors partners with Eucalyptus Systems, which provides a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by Xen and KVM. Eucalyptus will integrate ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise with the Eucalyptus open source software and Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition.

Both companies will also cooperate on sales, marketing and support activities.

VMware has announced the general availability of VMware Go Pro, a web based cloud service (SaaS) designed for small and midsized businesses (SMBs). Go Pro will provide the functionalities of VMware Go, the free web management service for ESXi adding functionalities like Software License Management, Hardware Asset Management, Patch Deployment (in partnership with Shavlik Technologies) and email support.

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Citrix has announced that it will start providing engineering support for optimization of Citrix products and Windows applications that run on Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform. Citrix will also start providing support for on-premise deployments in such a way that workloads can seamlessly be migrated between on-premise datacenters and EC2. They will also work with Amazon to optimize Windows instances hosting Windows applications based on their experience with XenServer.

Citrix networking products such as OpenCloud Access (detailed in December last year), OpenCloud Bridge, Branch Repeater and NetScaler will be validated to work with Amazon virtual appliances, and also provide a set of value added solutions that span enterprise and cloud, including Lab Management, Disaster Recovery, Compliance and more. Citrix will also provide end-to-end management of private and hosted workloads using XenCenter offering a single pane of glass to administrators.

RightScale, which offers a management solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) announced that it will support Azure VMs in its product Cloud Management Platform, the Register reports in a interview with CTO and founder Thorsten van Eicken.

RightScale currently supports a number of public IaaS clouds: Amazon EC2, GoGrid and FlexiScale. The company already announced the upcoming support for The Rackspace Cloud. It also supports those private IaaS clouds that are already managed by Eucalyptus, allowing customers to build and manage hybrid clouds architectures.

An early preview of the Azure VM role was released in December last year, and is still expected for the first half of this year.

Amazon has announced a new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform called Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk which is currently available as a public beta is capable of automatically configuring an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which contains Java, Apache and Tomcat, an Elastic Load-Balancer which can distribute incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances and an Auto Scaling group after web application code is uploaded.

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Symplified, which raised $9M in Series B funding beginning this month, and hired Michael Corbisiero as its VP of Worldwide Sales a week later, now announced that two former executives of Netscape will join its board of directors.

The first advisory board member is Taher Elgamal who was chief scientist for Netscape in the timeframe 1995-1998 where he invented SSL encryption and now . The second advisory board member is Todd Rulon-Miller, who was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services between 1994 and 1997. Both Elgamal and Rulon-Miller will provide Symplified’s management team with counsel on technology and growth strategy.

After releasing a public beta in November last year, Microsoft has now released the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit version 5.5. MAP provides agentless discovery, inventory and assessment for a variety of scenarios, now supporting assessment for migration to the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform.

The Windows Azure assessment inventories web applications and SQL Server database instances in the environment and reports the information you need to plan the migration of these on-premises workloads to the Windows Azure Services Platform and Microsoft SQL Azure Database.

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VMware has announced that it acquired NeoAccel. NeoAccel is a company providing a solution which provides end to end security for cloud computing combining the performance of IPsec VPNs with the benefits of SSL VPN technology, called NeoCloudSafe. The company was founded and led by Michel Susai, who also founded NetScaler.

VMware will integrate NeoAccel in the VMware vShield productline (announced at the VMworld 2010 conference) in order to provide a solution to customer to deploy secure private and hybrid clouds which provides secure access to applications and virtual desktops from any device, anywhere.

Beginning this month cloudcomputing.info reported obout Symplified which raised $9M in Series B funding. Now Symplified announced that it has hired Michael Corbisiero as its Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Bussines Wire reports. Corbisiero’s LinkedIn profile states though that he already joined Symplified in March 2010.

Corbisiero comes from Amberpoint were he was VP of Sales, he worked there for 8 years. Before that he was Sales Director at Sun Microsystems for 2 years, VP Sales at Forte Software for 7 years, Regional Sales Manager at Ingres for 6 years and Account Executive at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for 4 years. He started his career as Technical Marketing Program Manager at General Electric in 1981 where he worked for 2 years.