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Archives for August 2008

INX’ Virtualization Book Release Scheduled For VMware VMworld 2008 (Las Vegas)

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INX today announced the release of “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” at VMware VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

With the recent acquisition of AccessFlow in June, INX has made an aggressive move into the data center virtualization space by acquiring some of the most expert minds in the business. Those minds belong to Steve Kaplan and Gary Lamb, INX’s VP of Datacenter Virtualization and Senior Director of Data Center Virtualization Practice, respectively.
Steve and Gary have collaboratively written a book titled “Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” and will be releasing the book at this year’s VMware World trade show, September 15 through the 18th in Las Vegas.
“Deploying the VMware Infrastructure” provides a starting point for understanding the VMware Infrastructure and deploying it for cost reduction, quicker deployments of systems, and better control of resource utilization, as well as datacenter management and high availability.
Kaplan and Lamb have started a national book tour to promote and discuss the book this month and will continue to tour until VMworld. Steve Kaplan is founder of AccessFlow and formerly ran an ROI consulting firm. He has helped organizations around the globe quantify their IT costs, written scores of published IT articles and white papers on virtualization, power savings and has spoken at many venues across the globe including delivering the keynote address at Thin Power 2006 in Norway.

Surgient To Use IBM Jazz Platform To Enable More Efficient Application Development

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Surgient today announced it will offer integrated solutions with products built using IBM Jazz collaborative technologies. As a result, IBM quality assurance users can use Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform to allocate IT resources and set up and tear down virtual labs on-demand for software testing and quality assurance, introducing new efficiencies to the application development lifecycle.

IBM Jazz provides an open and extensible platform on top of which IBM, business partners and clients are building new development tools that integrate collaboration, team awareness and project health into every aspect of the software development lifecycle. Later this year, Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform will include an integration with IBM Rational Quality Manager, comprehensive test planning and process software that provides a single view into all aspects of a quality plan. Surgient’s product currently integrates with IBM’s Rational BuildForge.

By implementing the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform, development and QA organizations will benefit from Surgient’s self-service IT solution for virtual lab management. IBM Rational customers using IBM Rational Quality Manager can request and build a live application testing environment with specific configurations without manual administration from a company’s IT department, freeing up IT personnel to address additional business critical initiatives. Surgient was a visionary behind virtual lab management beginning in 2003 and now serves many of the world’s largest companies.

Surgient, meanwhile, is still being rumored to be either planning an IPO or serving as high-profile acquisition target.

Surgient

Terremark Completes Infinistructure Deployment

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Terremark Worldwide today announced the completed deployment of the Infinistructure utility-computing platform at its facilities in Madrid and Amsterdam. The platform will benefit Terremark’s European and American customers and has been met with high demand from current customers and prospects.

Infinistructure’s server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark’s proprietary service-management platform with virtualization technology from partners including VMWare, Cisco, and IBM, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform.

Infinistructure’s on-demand network, storage and computing architecture allows customers to precisely match their infrastructure to their business needs, while leveraging a fully managed solution with plug-and-play access to network connectivity from multiple carriers. The Infinistructure platform is connected to the ESpanix exchange point in Spain and the AMS-IX exchange point in The Netherlands, the largest internet connection point in Europe with over 400 Gb/s in peak traffic.

terremark

Countdown For The Business Technology Summit (India)

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The power team for Workhorse IT – SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, Virtualization and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) – will be center stage at Saltmarch Media‘s Business Technology Summit, for which Virtualization.com is proud to be one of the media sponsors.

The premier annual gathering for business technology stakeholders from across the world, the 2008 edition of Business Technology Summit will be held September 22-26 in Bangalore and Mumbai. (Also make sure you check out our Events page)

Expected to attend the four day conference and expo will be nearly 800 decision makers, analysts, product managers, architects, engineers, project managers, designers, developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, VC, marketers and business strategists – who are embracing the opportunities created by these mature and workhorse enterprise technologies. The attendee spectrum will also encompass the IT Channel – Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Value Added Resellers (VARs), System Integrators (SIs), and Distributors.

Centered around the theme of “Riding the Workhorse IT Hockey Stick”, BT Summit features four co-located tracks — SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, that offer complimentary synergistic for a robust IT infrastructure that no IT decision-maker, manager, architect or professional can afford to ignore in their quest for business technology success. Attendees to the summit will be able to attend talks from all four tracks.

Speakers, handpicked by the BT Summit chair, include Alan Pelz-Sharpe (ECM Analyst), Chris Harding (SOA Visionary), Peter Coffee (SaaS/PaaS Expert), Ismael Ghalimi (BPM Pioneer) Robert Marcus (Grid Visionary), Matjaz B. Juric (BPEL Mentor) Ravi Gururaj (Founder, VMLogix), Morris Panner (SaaS Workflow Expert) Sasa Ana (SOA Researcher) Nitin Borwankar (Father of Data 2.0), Hans de Groot (Web Globalization Expert).

In addition to keynotes, power panels, focussed sessions, and hands-on workshops over four days, one of the best reasons to attend BT Summit is the vibrant exhibition, which features leading business technology companies and their projects and services. Intalio, SDL Tridion, Progress Software and OpenAir among others are sponsors at the summit. Business Technology Summit sponsorship information is available here.

CohesiveFT Adds Elastic Server Support for Amazon EC2

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Tomorrow, CohesiveFT, makers of the Elastic Server platform, will announce support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) large, extra-large and high-CPU instances.

This is an expansion beyond the company’s existing support for standard instances on Amazon EC2’s 32-bit platform. Developers interested in defining software components for real-time deployment to Amazon EC2 can use the Elastic Server platform to build, test and deploy their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats.

The Elastic Server platform lets users choose their components from a library of popular software stacks. The platform also allows any individual, team or company to import their software offerings, a crowd-sourced practice that ensures the library continually reflects evolving market preferences. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. Support for the full spectrum of Amazon EC2 formats follows the company’s recent support for the Flexiscale cloud environment, the Skytap Virtual Lab, as well as its ongoing support for the VMware, Parallels, and Xen formats.

The Elastic Server platform features a dashboard that highlights the most popular user-selected components as well as an overall view of community activity. Users can also distribute their finished servers through the Elastic Server platform. There are currently more than a thousand community users contributing nearly three thousand Elastic Servers to the market.

Cohesive Flexible Technologies

Citrix Releases XenApp 5, Will It Prove To Become The Application Virtualization Standard?

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Remember when Brian Madden pointed out that Citrix XenApp 5.0 would be delayed for several months? Well, he was right, technically. Anyhow, Citrix today announced the release of Citrix XenApp 5, and claims it “breaks through performance and operating-cost barriers, making application start times up to 10 times faster, dramatically improving end-user experience and lowering application management costs by more than 25 percent over previous versions”.

“XenApp 5 broadens the horizon of the end-user experience and accessibility by delivering an end-to-end virtualization solution that addresses the needs of both local and hosted applications,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In addition, XenApp 5 is giving new and existing customers a welcome boost in performance at an attractive price-point, two highly sought-after requirements for companies investing in strategic technologies in today’s economy.”

XenApp, in combination with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer, creates an end-to-end virtualization solution that spans servers, applications and desktops. The new XenApp 5 release is being featured on September 9, 2008 as part of a global, online launch event, called Citrix Delivery Center Live!

With the release of XenApp 5, Citrix claims it is raising the bar with significant new improvements to performance, user experience and cost savings. In total, XenApp 5 includes more than 50 new major enhancements, according to the official press release.

XenApp 5, which runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform, leverages all the enhancements in Windows Server 2008 and fully supports Windows Server 2003. This enables existing Windows Server 2003 customers to immediately deploy Windows Server 2008 into their existing XenApp environments in any mix.

XenApp 5 will be available September 10, 2008. For North America, suggested retail pricing is per concurrent user (CCU) and includes one year of Subscription Advantage:

  • Advanced Edition – US $350
  • Enterprise Edition – US $450
  • Platinum Edition – US $600

Standalone pricing for client-side application streaming and virtualization begins as low as $60 per CCU.

Citrix Systems