As usual, VMworld is generating tons of news and product announcements from companies in the virtualization and cloud space. This week there’s a smattering of announcements that are worth checking out.
Let’s start with the MokaFive announcement on Tuesday about 12-minute desktop virtualization. Yesterday the company demonstrated the MokaFive Suite 3.7, which includes a simplified installer for streamlining VDI deployments.
The suite actually came out earlier this month, but the company had to do something to try to flog the release during VMworld. This release also allows customers to migrate to Microsoft SQL server from the embedded (Derby) database, adds Mac OS X Lion support, and improves the BareMetal Player with support for Intel’s SandyBridge CPUs. The BareMetal solution is probably one of the most interesting client virtualization products I’ve seen in a while.
Backup Announcements
Arkeia has updated its Network Backup for VMware vSphere 5 with a beta out now and general availability in October of this year. The update includes support for VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) to cut down on required storage and network traffic – providing faster backups.
Arkeia is also offering a virtual appliance, a ready-to-roll backup server for VMware ESX and ESXi. It includes one vStorage backup agent to serve one vSphere 5 host, with larger bundles available for more vSphere hosts. The backup agent starts at $1,500 and the virtual appliance starts at $2,000.
Tier 3 has also pushed out some backup news during VMworld. Tier 3, a cloud platform provider, announced Client Backup.
Client Backup is a file recovery application that provides copies of user data for customers using the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform. Unlike Dropbox and other cloud-based backup solutions, the Client Backup solution is meant for centralized management. This means that companies won’t have to depend on users managing Dropbox or another solution.
With Client Backup, users get revision history, hourly backups, data encryption, and more. The Client Backup offering doesn’t have any additional pricing, except the cost of additional storage.
Note that Tier 3 may not only have competition from providers like Box.net, but also VMware’s Project Octopus. According to VMware’s Sam Khavari, Project Octopus will provide client backup and file access from any device.
If this sounds a lot like Dropbox, it certainly looks a lot like it as well. Granted, they’re aimed at different markets – at least Dropbox hasn’t announced any enterprise products just yet – but from the peek VMware has provided so far Octopus looks like the same kind of seamless file backup.
For those folks who have been to VMworld, we’d be curious to hear what announcements or developments you’re most excited about.
