Robin Wauters

Gartner has announced that right at the end of 2009, it acquired competitor Burton Group for approximately $56 million in cash, reports TechCrunch.

Gartner financed the acquisition through the use of cash on hand and borrowings under its existing line of credit.

Burton Group is a Midvale, UT-headquartered research and advisory services firm that focuses on providing advice to IT professionals. According to the statement, Burton Group has approximately 41 research analysts, 40 sales and client service associates, and projected 2009 revenue of $30 million.

Gartner expects the acquisition of Burton Group to be accretive to its revenue, earnings and cash-flow over time. On a GAAP basis, the transaction is expected to be dilutive to income per share by ($0.12) – ($0.10) in 2010 and accretive to income per share by at least $0.00 – $0.03 in 2011.

Iomega, an EMC, today announced the launch of Iomega v.Clone software, an application that empowers individuals to create and carry on an Iomega hard drive an image of their primary PC which can be run on virtually any PC in the world.

Iomega’s v.Clone technology, to be demonstrated this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be available later this month as a download for purchasers of Iomega portable and desktop hard disk drives. In addition to being available by download, v.Clone software is expected to begin shipping with Iomega USB 2.0 portable hard disk drives beginning the first quarter of 2010.

Developed in conjunction with EMC and incorporating VMware virtualization technology, v.Clone makes a virtual clone of a primary computer’s operating system, applications and personal settings and stores that content on an Iomega external hard drive (USB interface only). Attach the Iomega external drive with v.Clone software to virtually any PC and the user now has access to everything that was on the primary computer. Data is not left behind on the secondary computer when the user is finished (only the application itself), and v.Clone also syncs your data back when you return to your primary computer.

What makes Iomega v.Clone software novel is its ability to keep the virtual image updated with changes made to the user’s primary PC, and to synchronize changes back to the primary PC when the Iomega USB hard drive containing the v.Clone image is reconnected. These capabilities give users the freedom to move between the physical computing environment on their primary PC and a virtual computing environment virtually anywhere they connect their Iomega external hard drive with Iomega v.Clone software.

With v.Clone technology, you can essentially run your virtual PC on another PC until you remedy the new OS or upgrade issues with your primary PC.

The Iomega v.Clone Software will be demonstrated at CES. Iomega expects v.Clone software to be available for downloads later this month, by purchasers of Iomega external hard drives.

Later in Q1, 2010, the Iomega v.Clone Software will ship pre-installed on Iomega portable hard disk drives, including Iomega® eGo(TM) Portable Hard Drives (USB), Iomega eGo Encrypt Plus Portable Hard Drives, Iomega eGo BlackBelt Portable Hard Drives, and Iomega Prestige(TM) Portable Hard Drives.

Yahoo is reportedly close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources ‘close to the situation’ told AllThingsDigital blogger Kara Swisher.

Her sources said the deal could be announced soon, and that the price for the open-source email unit, though still unclear, will likely be much lower than what Zimbra fetched when Yahoo bought the  startup in late 2007 for $350 million in cash.

Swisher also writes Yahoo has been unsuccessfully trying to sell Zimbra for several months now. Still according to ATD, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz personally approached VMware boss Paul Maritz after the web giant failed to attract substantial bids from other outfits.

If the report turns out to be correct, why do you think VMware would be interested in buying the open-source e-mail unit, and do you think it’s a good move for them to make?

According to Briefing.com (via The Register), Oracle is sniffing around Citrix Systems and may be interested in acquiring the company. As El Reg says, such an acquisition – which has been rumored before – would make sense:

That Oracle would be interested in buying Citrix is totally plausible. Oracle has its own implementation of the open source Xen hypervisor, which was based largely on the work done by Red Hat as it commercialized Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. When it became clear that Red Hat was going to shift to the KVM hypervisor when it bought Qumranet for $107m in September 2008, Oracle looked around for another set of Xen tools and snapped up Virtual Iron, which had its own variation on the Xen theme. But in August 2007 Citrix bought XenSource, the controller of the Xen project, for $500m – a very large sum for a company that had only $1m in sales at the time.

Oracle likes to be in control, as it soon will be with Java, so why not with x64-based server virtualization as well as application streaming and desktop virtualization? Oracle is a good fit for Citrix. But then again, Novell and Citrix could also merge.

Full article here, but what do you think?

QNAP Systems today unveiled its new series of ultra-high performance Turbo NAS servers TS-259 Pro, TS-459 Pro, TS-659 Pro and TS-859 Pro that have been certified as compatible with VMware’s vSphere4 (ESX 4.0) virtualization platform, ideal for departmental file sharing, storage, and advanced server applications in the office environment.

Shared networked storage is an essential component of a Cloud Computing infrastructure. The new Turbo NAS series incorporates the Intel Atom D-510 dual-core processor, which delivers exceptional performance and maintains high reliability for multiple concurrent tasks and intensive data transfer with very low power consumption.

The new Turbo NAS series comes with new version 3.2 of the QNAP NAS management software supporting lots of class-leading new features such as iSCSI, SPC-3 Persistent Reservation for clustering, and MPIO and MC/S. New DFS support (Folder Aggregation), import of user-list, customizable Daylight Saving Time, the next-generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, have been incorporated for future networking evolution also. QNAP’s Web File Manager 2 features an entirely redesigned user interface and functionality for improved file sharing and management. WebDAV is also available for users to collaboratively share, access, and edit files over HTTP(S). Additionally, Apple’s Time Machine backup is now supported.

The new Business Series Turbo NAS servers are available now through popular commercial distributors, resellers, and retailers.

Vizioncore has announced the availability of vFoglight 6.0, a performance monitoring and capacity planning tool.

vFoglight 6.0 provides an ideal virtualization management solution that enables administrators to better understand the complex relationships and interactions among all the components within a virtual infrastructure.

With vFoglight 6.0, Vizioncore has simplified the process for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) wanting to manage their virtual infrastructures by providing clarity and expertise to performance and availability issues through architectural representations and relationships. Virtualization management has become critical to the success of virtual infrastructure performance.

Vizioncore is a fully-owned subsidiary of Quest Software, a systems management vendor, with operations spanning the Americas, EMEA, Asia and Australia. The company’s products provide server virtualization management solutions that help customers protect, control and manage their IT systems, while allowing them to extract the maximum return on their investment in virtualization. Vizioncore’s products are built from the ground up to support virtual environments with no legacy encumbrances of products built for physical servers.

vFoglight 6.0 is an integrated solution that provides four critical benefits, including performance monitoring which detects, diagnoses and resolves problems affecting performance and availability in both virtual and physical server environments. It also offers capacity planning to reduce the need for additional resources to support the infrastructure, saving costs while gaining administration efficiencies. It also enables chargeback to provide cost transparency to IT management and business stakeholders that indicates what groups and workloads are consuming resources and allows costs to be recovered proportionately. It also provides Service Level Management to align IT and business by measuring service levels, performing chargeback and reporting key information to stakeholders.

In addition, vFoglight 6.0 offers scenario-based models and predictive alerts to help organizations plan, manage and optimize infrastructure capacity, improving performance and resource utilization. With built-in service dependency models, vFoglight 6.0 also lets administrators define SLA achievement and proactively monitor service health and availability.

vFoglight 6.0 is available for trial and download from the company site.