Archives for March 2010

Wanova today announced the general availability of Wanova Mirage software, a Distributed Desktop Virtualization solution that lets IT centrally manage the desktop, simplify support and protect remote and mobile PCs, while optimizing the end user experience.

Laptop sales now outpace desktops in the enterprise, but traditional virtualization technologies have provided little support for these millions of remote and mobile users. At the same time, industry analyst firm Gartner estimates the total cost of ownership for a notebook of a ‘somewhat managed day extender’ is $7,151.3, per year and has predicted that through 2015, managing mobile users will represent the biggest client management challenge. Wanova Mirage has reinvented desktop virtualization to significantly reduce both operational and capital expenses associated with these remote endpoints, in a way that meets the needs of both IT and the end user.

Wanova Mirage software centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes, while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to endpoint caches for performance and superior user experience. Wanova Mirage is unique for a number of reasons, including:

– Optimized for remote and mobile workers, providing native performance and support for offline use
– Supports single image management with persistent user personalization
– Hypervisor-free (but supports execution in a hypervisor)

Wanova Mirage is comprised of three key components: The Mirage Client installs onto the base operating system (OS) of the endpoint, with no hypervisor required. This ensures that there is no underlying unmanaged OS and reduces OS licensing costs compared to traditional VDI. However, Mirage is hypervisor-friendly, and can also be installed on an OS that is executed in a type-1 or type-2 hypervisor. The Mirage Server centralizes management of all desktops in the datacenter, and provides a powerful interface and functionality for controlling image-management, storage, and clients. Wanova’s Distributed Desktop Optimization (DDO) streams the complete desktop to a remote endpoint over a WAN in minutes and optimizes the bi-directional transfer of data between the endpoint cache and server.

Conceptually, Mirage layers each desktop into three major components: a Base Image, comprised of core OS and applications managed by IT; a personalization layer that includes user-installed application and machine state; and a user layer that contains data files and user settings. The combination of these layers is called a Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). CVDs are hardware agnostic, and therefore highly portable. With Wanova Distributed Desktop Optimization, the complete instance of a user’s desktop can be deployed anywhere, in minutes.

Wanova Mirage 1.3 is available immediately through Wanova. Pricing starts at $210 per endpoint and decreases with volume.

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced that R Systems, a service provider of flexible, on-demand high-performance computing resources to the commercial and academic research community, has deployed ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation in its data centers.

With vSMP Foundation, R Systems is able to isolate customer systems for security purposes, help customers avoid recoding of applications, eliminate the underutilization of systems, lower costs for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems and ensure that customers only pay for the resources they use within the R Systems cloud, improve data center flexibility and reduce system complexity.

R Systems provides its commercial and academic research community customers with dedicated hosting, shared systems, virtual private clusters and/or support for off-site/remote facilities. A typical researcher requests a hosted SMP system and R Systems provides them with access to the hardware, OS or applications at whatever level they want to take over responsibility. R Systems’ goal was to be able to easily provision SMP systems to meet customer requirements and lower SMP costs.

Additionally, the company wanted to help researchers avoid recoding applications and be able to easily isolate customers to offer them complete security and autonomy. In July 2008 R Systems adopted vSMP Foundation for SMP because it was the only solution that gave them full access to all of the RAM and any processor in a given system. The company has also adopted vSMP Foundation for Cloud for its dynamic virtual SMP provisioning needs.

Since deployment, the company has been able to eliminate the extra months it would generally take customers to recode their applications for a distributed memory system and can provide isolated and secure virtual SMP systems that are tailored to specific customer needs so customers only pay for compute power they use. R Systems has also reduced file system complexity using vSMP Foundation’s ability to pull everything into one operating system. Overall, vSMP Foundation has increased R Systems’ resource flexibility and enabled the company to deliver better customer service.

Red Hat today announced that the Symbian Foundation, a global non-profit organization formed to foster an open source community around its mobile device software, has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide a scalable, high-performance base for its private, cloud-based developer website and server.

By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in their cloud environment, the Symbian Foundation improved its ability to scale with business changes, new requirements and peaks in website traffic without the need to invest more heavily in additional onsite software and hardware resources.

Additionally, performance and manageability have increased with the greater ease of use and improved support delivered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, combined with the solution’s ability to handle heavy, mission-critical workloads.

CA has announced that its virtualization management solutions now support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform.

The expanded support of CA’s Service Assurance and Business-Driven Automation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization platforms helps enterprise and service provider customers to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from their complex virtualized and cloud computing infrastructures.

CA’s highly scalable and enterprise-class virtualization management products fully support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform, enabling customers to greatly reduce risk by using the same set of tools to centrally manage their virtualized and physical environments.

CA’s proactive performance alerts help customers improve service quality by identifying potential performance issues and quickly pinpointing the root cause of problems. CA’s deep visibility into business transactions and the reliability made innate by the automation of routine activities helps lead to improved operational excellence. The CA solutions also help customers put critical applications into production much faster, leading to much improved agility and faster time to market.