Virtualization News Desk

AMD Spins Off Manufacturing into a Joint Venture with Abu Dhabi

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:15:00 EDT

Hector Ruiz, the ex-AMD CEO who sheparded the so-called "asset lite" strategy into being, will be chairman and give up the chair at AMD. ATIC and AMD will split the board at the joint venture. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. It covers AMD's two fabs in Germany, plus related assets and IP, and 3,000 people. There is a separate 12-month deal between ATIC and Mubadala that will have Mubadala project-managing ATIC's interests in the Foundry.

Cloud Computing Is Real and It's Changing How We in the Software World Work

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing is real. Cloud computing is changing how we in the software world work. But it is not everything to everyone and it is definitely not the second coming that will change how we all interact on the Internet. While I respect Stephen Fry hugely, I find myself a little disappointed that he has jumped onto marketing hype and taken his legion of followers off on the wrong direction. I expected more.

SYS-CON Announces "Green IT Conference & Expo" to Take Place March 22-24, 2009 in New York City

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:33:00 EDT

In keeping with its tradition of producing the most relevant and timely events for Enterprise IT executives, managers, and engineers SYS-CON Events today announced the latest in its world-beating series of Conferences and Expos, "Green IT Conference and Expo" - an event devoted to the efficient use of computing resources in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

Moving Toward Virtualization

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:30:00 EDT

The promise of better use of resources, lower cost, and potential reduction of both power costs and real estate is a compelling reason to move toward virtualization. But the virtual data center raises some significant new issues in areas of performance, compliance, and security. Organizations that fail to protect their virtual infrastructure with the same diligence traditionally applied to the physical environment will be at risk of seriously compromising their business.

HP to Present at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:15:00 EDT

Is your IT Infrastructure holding your business back? Do you need to regain control of the virtual and physical server sprawl that can dominate today’s datacenters? See how you can develop a virtualization strategy that will enable you to transform your datacenter into a cost-effective, energy efficient and responsive IT environment that can dynamically adapt to the changing requirements in your business.

Cloud Computing: IBM Launches Its Cloud-Enabled Services Portfolio

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:15:00 EDT

"Cloud computing will take off when companies can utilize data, applications and services from any device and from any location," said Willy Chiu, IBM vice president for high performance on demand solutions, as IBM this week launched a company-wide initiative expanding enterprise computing from the traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud computing applications.

Application Virtualization: Instant Migration to Vista, Fast Delivery, Secure Access, Side-by-Side Deployments

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Application virtualization is a technologically elegant solution that isolates applications and reduces conflicts. That's good for IT management and has the additional virtue of being financially alluring. From legacy to enterprise business applications, virtualized deployment eased management and supported secure access. Companies saved money and boosted efficiency using application virtualization within IT infrastructures. Attendees learned details of how, when and why application virtualization was a best practice for enterprise IT. This talk covered the fundamentals of application virtualization and technical issues from terminal server to desktop. Using case instances to illustrate benefits in various architectures, the discussion included scenarios that detail migration and IT architectural shifts incorporating application virtualization.

Amazon EC2 To Add Windows

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:30:00 EDT

Amazon said Wednesday that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), currently limited to various Unix and Linux operating systems, will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall, describing it as "one of our most requested features." It's currently running a private beta of the widgetry.

Microsoft To Unleash Windows Cloud

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:30:00 EDT

At the end of this month, at its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft intends to unveil something that CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday referred to as "Windows Cloud." Ballmer explained that "Just like Windows Server looked a lot like Windows but with new properties, new characteristics and new features, so will Windows Cloud look a lot like Windows Server."

Alessandro Perilli Cancels His Virtualization Congress with More Than 30 Paid Sponsors

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:30:00 EDT

This morning I finally got a chance to plan my travel arrangements for Alessandro Perilli's Virtualization Congress, which was supposed to take place next week in London, England. When I went to his website, to my surprise I found out that he had canceled his show. According to the vmblog: "Evidently, it is being canceled because of low registration and a tough macro-economic climate. And it's a shame too, because the event was being backed by a number of big names in the industry, with nearly 30 sponsors willing to pony up to help support the show. That's a clear sign that the vendor community is ready for an independent virtualization event, and after listening to the folks on the show room floor at VMworld, attendees are ready for something new and different as well."

Bringing Fault-Tolerant Software to Server Virtualization

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:45:00 EDT

Marathon Technologies announced that it has entered into a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro. Under terms of the agreement, Ingram Micro will offer Marathon's everRun high availability and disaster recovery software to its resellers in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Included in the distribution agreement is Marathon's everRun VM, the fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization that is integrated with Citrix XenServer.

The Role of Cloud Computing

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Let me show how I see Cloud (and virtualization as enabling technology) and Grid as complementary technologies that will coexist and cooperate at different levels of abstraction in future infrastructures. I will first clearly state my position about Cloud and Grid, which are complementary technologies.

HP Nominated for SYS-CON's "Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards"

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:00:00 EDT

The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family offers a combination of high-performance and availability features, virtualization capabilities and advanced provisioning software that makes it ideal to cost-effectively manage large amounts of data in a SAN environment without investing in deep storage experience.

Making the Right Server Virtualization Decision

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

When it comes to choosing a server virtualization technology, functionality, scalability, ease-of-use, packaging and pricing are all important – whether you are a large enterprise with thousands of servers, or a small enterprise with less than 20. Unfortunately, organizations often have to sacrifice one for the other – i.e., forfeit feature/function for price or feature/function for ease of use, etc. But that's changing for the better for users.

Why Do Investors Care About Cloud Computing?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing seems to be the buzzword in IT these days as companies are looking for the next big thing in computing. The IT folks at the leading companies are working hard to roll out these “clouds.” This emerging technology is gaining attention from major research institutions including Carnegie Mellon University. Let's not forget the likes of Google, IBM, and Microsoft who are amongst a large group of corporations investing time and money to mature this unique idea.

AMD's Virtualization Play - Shanghai Due After Istanbul

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

AMD’s first 45nm chip, the Shanghai version of its quad-core Barcelona server processor, is reportedly in full production. The company has reportedly pulled in delivery of two-way and eight-way models from Q1 to any minute now. Shanghai evidently means a 20% improvement over Barcelona at the same frequencies and a performance-enhancing increase in cache size to 6MB. It only supports HyperTransport 1.0 however.

HP Acquires LeftHand Networks to Extend Virtualization Solutions

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:00:00 EDT

HP announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks. LeftHand Networks' solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments.

First-Ever Cloud Computing Bootcamp Expected to be Sold-Out

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Cloud computing is an opportunity for businesses to implement low-cost, low-power and high-efficiency systems to deliver scalable infrastructure. But moving to a cloud infrastructure is not necessarily as nice and clean as the providers would want you to think. With cloud infrastructures problems don't magically go away; they just shift: you don't have scalability or storage problems any more, but you need to constantly monitor the cloud and your application in it.

Embotics' Nominated for Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Award

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Embotics has been nominated by the Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards for the Best Virtual Machine (VM) Lifecycle Management award. Embotics' flagship product V-Commander 2.0 is successful at helping enterprises reduce risk and costs by automatically managing and controlling virtual machines throughout their lifecycle.

What Happens When SOA and Virtualization Intersect?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:00:00 EDT

Virtualization is a buzzword that is living up to its hype as it takes hold in IT. It has spawned magazine covers, conferences, and analyst reports, and all with good reason. Virtualization allows applications to be deployed in a highly efficient manner. By taking the physical servers out of the equation, virtualization allows applications to be deployed across a number of servers, or for multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on one server.

Virtualization Webcast on SYS-CON.TV - Red Hat and the Opening of Virtualization

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:15:00 EDT

Open Source. Open Standards. Open Collaboration. For the past 15 years, Linux has served as the benchmark of a successful global open source project. The impact has been far reaching: today it powers the Internet, a significant portion of the datacenter, is the emerging market choice for the desktop, and soon will likely be on your phone. Over the last 5 years, this open community has turned its attention to virtualization.

Cloud Computing Is for Capitalist Pigs - Raul Castro

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Castro continued: "In Cuba we provide free health care, free food coupons, free housing and if we had any computers on the island, we would provide free laptops and Internet too. So, I agree with Richard Stallman that Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and all American companies pushing this new Cloud Computing concept are among the axis of evil who want to hook you like Coca-Cola and McDonald's. Why would you pay Amazon for their cloud computing service, if you can hassle them to give it to you for free? Americans should join the Cuban revolution and make hardware and software, including cloud computing, free. By doing this, the government can hand out laptop coupons in supermarkets next to the bread aisle. Think about it!"

RIA Conference Keynotes: Adobe & Microsoft

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Join Scott Guthrie as he discusses Microsoft’s commitment to web standards development, Rich Internet Applications and how Microsoft is contributing to help move the web forward. Join Adobe’s Kevin Lynch as he demonstrates how Flash and HTML come together to make the most engaging, effective user experiences across operating systems and browsers.

Microsoft's Hyper-V Released

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Let the games begin. First thing this morning Microsoft said that its standalone Hyper-V Server 2008, the bare metal hypervisor meant to help it wrest leadership of the virtualization market from VMware, would be available today. Anticipating Microsoft’s coming, VMware declared its standalone hypervisor a commodity a couple of months ago and – in a market broadening play – cut the $495-$1,090 price to free. Microsoft, which was only supposed to charge a nominal 28 bucks a head for its like-minded widgetry, followed suit a few weeks later.

APC and CA Team to Deliver Green IT Management

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:00:00 EDT

APC by Schneider Electric and CA have announced a partnership that will provide enterprise customers a fully integrated solution set for assessing and fully optimizing their data center energy consumption. APC will offer assessment services, integration services, and physical layer management software. CA will provide enterprise-level monitoring and management software and related services solutions.

Exclusive Virtualization Journal Q&A with Mike Neil, GM for Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

"Virtualization is an emerging industry," says Mike Neil, Microsoft's GM for Virtualization, in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's Virtualization Journal. "But given the increasing demands on IT and decreasing resources and funding allocated within businesses, customers are ready and looking for a long term virtualization investment," Neil continues. The Q&A with SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan covers a wide range of very timely topics.

How to Manage Application Performance and Load Testing in Virtual Environments

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Gone are the days when you could test an interface to a single client/server app and know that you have performance covered. Today's interconnected systems such as fully integrated packaged applications, ESB-based enterprise platforms, and SOA make ensuring high-performance from application components and solutions increasingly difficult.

Virtualization on Wall Street Conference & Expo Will Be a Leading Technology Event in New York

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Virtualization on Wall Street Conference & Expo will take place on March 22-24, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe who will be converging in New York City to attend this comprehensive meeting on Virtualization on Wall Street.

The Dark Side of Virtualization

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:45:00 EDT

. Businesses are consolidating their sprawl of underutilized Windows, Linux and Solaris systems, reaping the benefits of saving precious space and energy. Data center infrastructure capital costs are almost equal to the annualized costs of purchasing and operating IT hardware1 and virtualization is bringing relief on both these fronts.

CA to Provide Virtualization Solutions to Wall Street

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

CA announced the formation of an advisory committee to help its Wall Street customers improve the performance and availability of key business services, lower the cost of delivering services and meet compliance requirements using workload automation technology.

The Green IT Side of Server Virtualization

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:45:00 EDT

Until recently the primary motivator for deploying server virtualization was consolidation. Server virtualization gave organizations a way of controlling their sprawling physical server environments by letting them run more than one application and one operating system on a single physical server. It was an IT manager’s dream and, as it turned out, a CIO's too.

First-Ever Cloud Computing Bootcamp Expected to be Sold-Out

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 04:00:00 EDT

Being held for the first time at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA, on November 19, 2008, the Cloud Computing Bootcamp will show you how to take advantage of the cloud. Cloud computing is an opportunity for businesses to implement low-cost, low-power and high-efficiency systems to deliver scalable infrastructure. But moving to a cloud infrastructure is not necessarily as nice and clean as the providers would want you to think.

Xiotech Announces Alliance With Virtualization Innovator Xcedex

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:45:00 EDT

Xiotech announced that it has entered into an alliance with Xcedex. Under the agreement, Xiotech is able to offer Xcedex's proprietary X_Factor Virtualization Readiness Planning (VRP) and Virtualization Readiness Design (VRD) analytics tools to its customers, allowing them to assess their IT environments for the approval, preparation and planning of virtual projects. This added level of detail will pay off for clients in increased control, higher return on investment (ROI) and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) throughout their data centers.

rPath Ships Virtualization Appliances

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:45:00 EDT

rPath announced that SOASTA has selected rPath’s rBuilder and the rPath Lifecycle Management Platform to build and maintain its CloudTest application images for virtualized and bare metal environments. rPath provides SOASTA with end-to-end technology that simplifies the entire range of lifecycle management activities and reduces development, deployment and support costs.

Open-E Releases Data Storage Server for VMware ESX 3.5 Virtualization

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:45:00 EDT

Open-E announced general availability of Data Storage Server (DSS) for VMware ESX 3.5. VMware provides TAP program members with tools to develop products that are complementary to VMware virtualization software and help deliver high-value solutions to joint customers. Data Storage Server for VMware ESX 3.5 will provide mutual customers with enhanced capabilities for consolidating storage environments.

Transitive Expands Asia-Pacific Virtualization Business

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:30:00 EDT

As cross-platform virtualization is becoming accepted by CIOs and IT managers as a cost-effective solution for datacenter consolidation, workload replication, scalability, business continuity and legacy application migration, the level of international interest in QuickTransit has grown. To meet this demand, Transitive is expanding its network of resellers in regions such as Australia that are broadly adopting virtualization solutions.

Open-E Data Storage Server Certified with Virtual Iron's Server Virtualization Software

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Open-E announced that Open-E Data Storage Server (DSS) has been certified for use with Virtual Iron's server virtualization software. Environments deploying both Virtual Iron and Open-E Data Storage Server (DSS) will benefit from streamlined virtual infrastructure, improved server and storage utilization and robust business continuity.

TechTarget Gets Caught Spying on SYS-CON Media

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events' sales team replied to Scott Kelly's exhibitor inquiry, but when they never heard back from Scott, they decided to do a little Googling and here is what they found out. Mr Kelly is actually the 'Director of Product Management at TechTarget,' a technology media company that is struggling to produce a competitive show (with no luck) and compete with AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo. No wonder TechTarget is in pitiful shape as a competitor of SYS-CON Events. Look at the actions of their senior management - they can't even spy on their competitors, forget about putting together a show. :- ))

Layered Technologies Expand Virtualization Offerings

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Layered Technologies announced that its recently completed network upgrades further strengthen its ability to handle complex requirements of enterprise-class customers for traditional and virtualization platforms, while simultaneously positioning Layered Tech to effectively manage its rapid growth. Network investments include expanding its number of carriers so that customers have a superior blend of Internet pathways.

SAVVIS Selects Parallels Virtualization

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:15:00 EDT

SAVVIS announced a business alliance with virtualization and automation software provider, Parallels. The alliance enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to convert their single-tenancy applications to operate in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment without having to re-architect their software. Combining SAVVIS' existing global hosting and network infrastructure with Parallels Virtuozzo Containers virtualization and Parallels Automation, the alliance creates a comprehensive SaaS IT infrastructure service delivery platform.