Quest Software - 2

Vizioncore has entered into an OEM Agreement with Dell.  Dell has been a partner of Vizioncore for more than two years.  By taking this strategic step, Dell will be able to offer Vizioncore's vRanger Pro, vReplicator, vFoglight (formerly vCharter Pro) and vConverter products directly to their customers. 

Vizioncore will be demonstrating a number of new and updated products at VMworld next month, and also offering ‘sneak previews’ of a couple of near term products. 

• Backup/Recovery with information about the re-engineered vRanger Pro 4.0
• VM Optimization and Storage Reclamation with the all new vOptimizer Pro designed for ESX in the data center
• Virtualization Performance Monitoring & Vizioncore's future chargeback capability
• P2V Server Consolidation and Disaster Recovery with vConverter 4.0
• Virtualization Workflow Automation and a new automation studio
• Heterogeneous Administration & Control and a new orchestration console

Vizioncore will be launching a training program during the month of August to cover their four main industry-leading solutions, including vCharter Pro, vRanger Pro, vReplicator and vConverter.  Courseware on these products will cover a spectrum of topics, including industry overview, customer requirements, installation, features details, troubleshooting and best practices. This training will be geared to technical professionals and will be offered only to Vizioncore Partners.

vReplicator 2.5 provides some excellent upgraded features to allow customers to leverage software-based replication and virtualization to drive their High Availability and Disaster Recovery strategies. vReplicator 2.5 offers several new major features that support these objectives, including the following:

• VSS (Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service) Support to enable quiescing of supported databases to ensure transactionally consistent image backups
• Two Types of Replication:  Differential, which allows customers to backup all the changed data since the last full back up, and Hybrid, to allow customers to schedule shorter replication intervals by backing up only the data that has changed from the last interval backup
• Replication of VMs to Multiple Destinations, which allows a company to accomplish multiple objectives for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
• Ability to Export Reports in Adobe® PDF, XML or Microsoft® Excel formats allowing data to be imported into third-party reporting tools
• Skipping VMDKs, which allows skipping of non-essential disks for faster replication passes

The result of this latest round of upgrades is that vReplicator 2.5 is now faster than ever – up to 10x speed improvements in the typical environment. The new features of vReplicator 2.5 will be outlined in detail during Vizioncore’s vReplicator Overview Webinar on July 3, 2008.

RUSS NAPLES, CITRIX VETERAN, JOINS VIZIONCORE AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Vizioncore is pleased to announce that Russ Naples is the new senior vice president of product development reporting into Vizioncore President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Akerberg effective immediately.
Prior to joining Vizioncore, Naples spent 13 years in increasingly important product development roles at Citrix Systems, beginning as a director in testing and rising to vice president of product development for the company. Before Citrix, Naples served as project lead in General Electric’s Systems Integration, Test and Quality Department and has experience teaching management science courses at the university level.
Naples holds a Master’s in Business Administration from Chapman University in addition to a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and has served on several university advisory boards related to engineering and computer science.

Announced just this week, Vizioncore is one of a limited set of partners to be included in the new VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative. Technology Alliance Partners from a broad range of technology sectors, including storage, business continuity and disaster recovery, networking, and security, have created VMware-oriented virtualization training and tools for the sale of their products  to create complete solutions for customers. Technology Alliance Partners helping to launch this initiative include CA, Dell, EMC, McAfee, NetApp, Riverbed and Vizioncore.

"Vizioncore has a complete suite of products to enhance VMware Infrastructure for hot image backup, restore, monitoring and DR. Partners find that our joint solution expands the breadth of the VMware sale and positions the partner as the trusted advisor in their accounts"

Chris Akerberg, President and COO, Vizioncore

Vizioncore's vCharter Pro is the first enterprise-class, scalable performance monitoring solution for companies running hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines.  Powered by Foglight®, vCharter Pro has built-in awareness of VMware® Infrastructure, which provides layered views encompassing VirtualCenter, Datacenter, clusters, resource pools, ESX Server, VM and datastore levels. vCharter Pro can help administrators pinpoint resource contention issues among CPU, memory, disk or NIC.  Collected metrics are filtered via rules and customized alarms and stored in a central database for unattended monitoring and historical trending.  With just a few mouse clicks, administrators can drill from the top down through lower layers to uncover problems, and by clicking on alarms, can obtain further information through pop-up windows.

I just had a short email conversation with Chris Akerberg and he confirmed that David Bieneman has left Vizioncore. Chris has taken over David’s responsibilities and is heading Vizioncore from now on as president. I’m wondering what David’s plans are, but I think that we’ll hear from him soon. Maybe he’s creating another great invention like he did with his Ranger a few years ago.

A short quote from Quest Software: David has indicated that he is going to work independently on new product ideas.

Larry Loucks, CISSP/VCP/VCI/SCP/MCSE, is a 22-year veteran of the IT industry who has served in many capacities including Novell/Microsoft/Cisco engineering, network design and optimization, and security consulting. During the past 10 years, Larry has worked in consulting with an aim toward improving infrastructure performance while lowering costs of IT to business. Larry joined the virtualization industry around four years ago, and is a former VMware Senior Consultant.

March 4: vCharter Overview

March 6: vRanger Pro 3.2 Overview

March 11: vReplicator Overview

March 13: vConverter Overview

March 18: vRanger Pro 3.2 & VCB

Vizioncore announced vConverter, the fastest, easiest and most reliable tool for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine conversions. Customers working with VMware, Microsoft, XenServer or Virtual Iron environments can use vConverter to significantly simplify, automate and accelerate the machine to machine conversion process, maximize system availability and eliminate any potential impact on physical systems.  As customers increasingly look to standardize on virtual infrastructures, the reliability and performance of conversion tools are critical factors in ensuring that migration projects are as non-disruptive and require as few man-hours as possible. Server consolidation initiatives often allow only a few hours at weekends in order to perform conversions, so a fast, reliable tool that automates many of the manual pre- and post-migration tasks is critical to achieving maximum successful P2V conversions per time window.