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provision Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments, along with associated storage and network configurations to bare-metal and Xen virtual machines. With this new support of Xen, Scalent has broadened the range of supported virtualization platforms, giving data center administrators greater flexibility.
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Scalent's software already supports provisioning provider VMware virtual environments and plans to offer the same capabilities for Microsoft Hyper-V when the market demands it, said Kevin Epstein, Scalent's vice president marketing.
Larger data centers with multiple resources and more complex environments make up the bulk of users of Scalent's Virtual Operating Environment (V/OE). V/OE enables admins to quickly provision virtual and bare-metal servers and thus quickly re-arrange resources, said Epstein. So, for example, if a company expects its Web traffic to spike, "IT can kill off a few email servers and use them as Web servers instead, either manually or through [Scalent software] scripts that detect server workloads and performs automatic transitions."
Once Scalent's software is loaded onto a system, it can also reach out to any or all physical machines in a data center and turn some or all on and off. When the software turns a machine on, it also points each server to whichever network and storage the administrator chooses, said Epstein.
"The advantage of this type of automated management software is saved time," Epstein added. For example, over the past few weeks financial companies that support online stock trading have likely seen a major increase in trading because of the mergers and collapses of major banks. "IT at those companies [is] frantically trying to turn off some systems and … add trading computers to handle the capacity. Scalent can make these changes to thousands of computers at once."
V/OE new support of Xen extends this flexibility to a wider variety of virtualization environments. "Customers want to manage and automate both the virtual side and the bare-metal side, but when you run virtual and physicals machines, a lot of time it feels like there is a wall between the two worlds. This [software] takes a jackhammer to the wall when it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Xen," Epstein said.
Other features of Scalent's software include the following:
- high availability and server failover through Scalent's N+1 technology;
- fully automated disaster recovery across data centers;
- creation of server pools that allow server rightsizing and scalability through repurposing; and
- chargeback capabilities; logical, secure partitioning and named pools of resources to enable rapid changes to lab or production environments.
Users with existing Scalent support contacts will automatically receive support for Red Hat and Xen. The list price for Scalent V/OE is $1,000 per physical socket, not counting support fees.
Let us know what you think about the story; email Bridget Botelho, News Writer.