California based Thinsy announces that it is joining the growing list of Xen based virtualization platforms. Just after Oracle announced the introduction of its Xen based platform, Oracle VM, Thinsy becomes the seventh commercial virtualization platform announced making use of the Xen hypervisor technology.

The company has announced the EnSpeed VM family of products which is made up of the EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) server and the EnSpeed VM Orchestrator.

The EnSpeed VMM is a Xen based virtualization server that is installed on bare metal. The company is taking a different approach with its virtualization platform offering than its competitors. Rather than focusing on an expensive SAN solution, Thinsy is providing enterprise grade features using direct attached storage (DAS) and its LiveSync technology. They offer:

• High Availability Backup for VMs to failover to a secondary VMM, should the primary VMM server fail – all without SAN or NAS external storage.
  
• Live Migration of powered up VMs from the primary VMM server to the backup VMM server.
  
• VM Snapshots - enables full backups, without powering off the VM
  
• Daily Incremental backup of VMs – without powering off the VM.

The EnSpeed VM Orchestrator is the company's java based Web server hosted application. It provides the following functionality:

• Create and load Virtual Machines onto EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor Servers. The Virtual Machines are created using Virtual Appliance Images stored in the Orchestrator's Virtual Appliance Library
  
• Power On/Off of Virtual Machines loaded onto the EnSpeed Virtual Machine Monitor Servers.
  
• Open a remote console to the Virtual Machine within a web browser window.
  
• Take a snapshot of a running VM, in order to download a full backup. This is done without powering off the VM.
  
• Download incremental backup images of the VM

The company hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet, but the products are both available for download, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 21, 2007 02:44 PM