New Solutions for Virtualized Environments

Several vendors, including Dell Inc., EMC Corp., Symantec Corp., Syncsort Inc., and VMware, Inc., announced new and updated offerings to manage and support virtual environments.

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• EMC announced that is has partnered with MapR Technologies Inc. to offer two new Hadoop-based software products for processing both structured and unstructured data. The Greenplum HD Community and Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition are based on the Apache Software Foundation's data management software, and are optimized to run on virtual machines. Both products include installation, training, and global technical support, said EMC. The Greenplum HD Community Edition is a downloadable, free software stack, while the Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition is tailored for corporate data centers. No pricing has been released yet for the Enterprise Edition. Additionally, EMC introduced the new Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance. The appliance is built on top of Intel Corp. x86 servers, and uses both a structured database built by Greenplum and Hadoop. It is due out in the third quarter, EMC added. Meanwhile, data management vendor Syncsort also announced its entry into the Hadoop community. Instead of using Hadoop's default sort, the company plans to enable users to swap in another sorting system via an external sort plug-in capability that Syncsort is contributing to Hadoop. Syncsort will also offer a Hadoop-based version of its DMExpress data acceleration software, providing an alternative to the default Hadoop sort, said Syncsort.
• Dell unveiled the PowerEdge M915, a four-socket blade server with up to 48 processor cores. The server runs on Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD)'s Opteron 6100 processors, which include up to 12 cores. The high number of cores helps to expand the number of virtual machines available, said Dell. The server comes with Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenServer, Microsoft Corp.'s Hyper-V, and VMware's ESXi Hypervisor software. Operating system options include Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat, Inc. Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or Windows Server, Dell added. The blade will be available worldwide at the end of May starting at $3,500. Separately, Symantec announced several new and updated software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise storage products. The vendor released Backup Exec.cloud for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and said it would release the hosted Enterprise Vault.cloud product in June. Also in June, Symantec revealed that it would release a preconfigured Backup Exec appliance that will eliminate the need for hardware and software integration for small businesses. Additionally, the company announced updates to Backup Exec 2010. Symantec also announced that the Enterprise Vault 10 archiving product can now be used to archive social media postings from blogs or social networking sites and for compliance, corporate governance, or e-discovery.
• Symantec unveiled Veritas Operations Manager 4.0, a centralized management platform for Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server. The vendor also announced Veritas Operations Manager Advanced, which offers deep reporting for physical and virtual server environments. Finally, VMware announced that it has integrated Microsoft's Active Directory with its vCenter Orchestrator tool, to automate the management of directory services tasks. The plug-in is compatible with Active Directory 2003 and 2008, and comes with 34 pre-built workflows, said VMware. Meanwhile, VMware experienced two outages to its new cloud computing service, Cloud Foundry, over the course of two days. The first incident lasted approximately10 hours, and was caused by a power outage in the supply for a storage cabinet, said the vendor. Applications remained online, but developers were not able to perform basic tasks such as logging in or creating new applications. However, the next day, VMware inadvertently caused a second outage while developing an early detection plan to prevent service disruptions. The second outage was the more serious of the two, according to the vendor.

Experton Group believes the advent of stronger management tools geared for the cloud and big data solutions signals the maturing of the cloud and big data markets. EMC has updated its thrust from last year's "journey to the private cloud" theme to hybrid clouds and big data. The company is fully committed to the driving the journey and is eating its own dog food. VMware, an EMC subsidiary, is working tightly with Cisco Systems, Inc., EMC, Intel and other vendors to be the provider of the standard virtual underpinnings of the cloud world. The company hopes its Cloud Foundry becomes a standard application developer platform and the basis for application independence via an open platform. The outages, like Amazon.com Inc.'s earlier one, illustrate the difficulty multi-tenant cloud providers are encountering as they seek to achieve reasonable service level guarantees. IT executives should take nothing for granted, vet cloud providers thoroughly and ensure the contracts commit to the service levels that are quoted by sales staff and marketing Web sites. Dell is working diligently to compete as a full service provider against Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and the VCE Alliance (backed by Cisco, EMC, and VMware). Dell has done well as a provider of custom servers for Web companies and the new announcement keeps them in the game. But Experton Group expects the game to get rougher for Dell, as it attempts to switch from a transactional seller of gear to a true service provider.  Symantec continues to demonstrate it can maintain a leadership position in its storage archiving, backup and security spaces. Look for the company to push to gain market share while McAfee is being absorbed by Intel. Lastly, Syncsort is moving to remain a data management player by providing big data and Hadoop offerings. Whether its contributions to the Hadoop community can keep it relevant as the market shifts remains to be seen. IT executives should include offerings from Symantec and Syncsort on their shortlists, where appropriate.