Robin Wauters

mindSHIFT Technologies, an industry leader in delivering managed IT services to businesses, today launched NextDesktop, an online service that provides small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) with the first affordable hosted Windows desktop solution.

With prices starting at $39.99 per user per month — vs. more than $100 per user per month for competing hosted desktop solutions — NextDesktop extends mindSHIFT’s managed desktop line to provide a basic Windows desktop to budget-conscious organizations that don’t require the comprehensive 24-hour hardware, server, network, Help Desk and file restoration support of mindSHIFT’s fully-managed desktop solutions.

The NextDesktop hosted service provides an affordable option for budget-conscious organizations, especially:

• Start-ups
• SMBs needing to replace out-of-warranty PCs and laptops
• SMBs adding new employees or new offices
• SMBs with employees who do not use graphics or multimedia-intensive applications

Compared to traditional PCs and other hosted desktops, NextDesktop offers a more cost-effective and worry-free alternative to effectively address SMB IT needs:

1. Lower operational and capital expenditure costs, with the lowest price in the market and the ability to either utilize existing hardware or purchase less expensive thin client devices.
2. Reduced IT burden, eliminating the need to upgrade PCs and offloading administrative IT tasks, such as security, data backup, anti-virus and other patches, Help Desk services and software upgrades.
3. Better security, with real-time anti-virus and anti-spyware updates, ongoing Microsoft patches, and storage and backup of all of a business’s Windows desktop data, documents and applications inNextDesktop’s secure data center.

Because the data and applications are stored, or “hosted” in the secure data center, employees can access their desktop data and applications from any location using any PC, laptop, thin client or smartphone – as long as they have an Internet connection on their device.

In addition, NextDesktop offers online provisioning, based on mindSHIFT’s proprietary technology, allowing businesses to add and remove users within seconds, compared with hours or days required with other approaches. Furthermore, mindSHIFT uses Internap’s® Performance IP™ technology to provide stable, predictable Internet performance, which enhances employee productivity by preventing the lag time, or latency, which is typical of other hosted solutions. With this technology, emails and other data are routed via the fastest network based on a proactive, real-time analysis of Internet traffic and bottlenecks.

mindSHIFT manages nearly 80,000 mailboxes and 20,000 desktops for professional workers in small and mid-sized organizations. A team of 385 employees provides IT support and IT services to more than 10,000 organizations in more than 100 countries.

For $39.99 per user per month, NextDesktop includes the following features:

• Access to office desktop from everywhere, all the time
• Choice of Office applications for productivity options:
  • OpenOffice: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base
  • Microsoft Office 2007: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (an additional $9.99/seat/month)
• Data and applications, including Windows, running in mindSHIFT’s 24x7x365 Tier 4 data center
• Effective management of lag time with Internap Performance IP to decrease latency
• Instant Office feature – Web-based control panel for immediate setup of new users and services by authorized administrative user
• PDF creator and Adobe Reader
• 1 GB of disk space for each user to store documents
• Daily backup of all data
• Real-time anti-virus and anti-spyware updates from Trend Micro
• Live U.S.-based Help Desk via telephone and email
• Timely, transparent software patches and updates
• Month-to-month contract

Available upgrades include Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 email; BlackBerry, iPhone and other smartphone synchronization to Outlook email, calendar and tasks; email archiving; SharePoint; and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Sun Microsystems today announced a new release of Sun Ops Center, its comprehensive and highly scalable management solution for both physical and virtual systems. In addition to managing Sun’s x86 and SPARC servers, Ops Center 2.5 now extends lifecycle management capabilities to Sun’s built-in virtualization technologies, including Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains (LDoms). Ops Center 2.5 is designed to help customers regain control over system sprawl, reduce IT costs and make datacenters more flexible, laying the foundation for managing private cloud environments.

By using advanced technologies and built-in automated workflows, Ops Center 2.5 allows users to maintain consistent deployment of firmware, OS, and applications across physical and virtual resources, speed deployment time, as well as improve business continuity by quickly provisioning new systems and dynamically allocating resources. From a single and intuitive browser-based console, Ops Center 2.5 automates and controls Sun infrastructure as well as heterogeneous environments running the Solaris(TM) Operating System (OS), Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL).

New features in Ops Center 2.5 include:

— Ability to create, delete, configure, monitor, and migrate Solaris Containers and LDoms from a single console.

— Ability to patch the Solaris OS using Solaris(TM) Live Upgrade software with minimal downtime.

— Cutting-edge virtual storage library management using Fiber Channel, NFS or ZFS(TM) software.

— Advanced patching for Microsoft Windows via integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, giving customers a single pane to patch Solaris, Linux and Windows OSes.

— Full support for discovery, monitoring, provisioning and patching of servers running Oracle Enterprise Linux.

— Advanced, automatic datacenter asset grouping to accelerate initiation of repetitive tasks.

Sun offers subscriptions and perpetual licenses for Ops Center. Commercial subscriptions are priced annually per system starting at $500 for the Premium Management Pack, which includes patching and provisioning, and $1000 for the Enterprise Management Pack, which includes full virtualization management. Enterprise Management Pack subscriptions are only sold with Premium Management Pack subscriptions.

xkoto today announced availability of GRIDSCALE 5.1, the latest release of its active-active solution for Microsoft SQL Server. GRIDSCALE 5.1 adds several features that enhance the performance and capabilities of the industry’s first shared-nothing solution for SQL Server, including native driver support and a new Cluster Lock Manager.

GRIDSCALE 5.1 features a new, “driverless” configuration mode for Microsoft SQL Server. By implementing the Microsoft SQL Server tabular data stream (TDS) protocol, GRIDSCALE is now compatible with native SQL Server drivers, including ADO, .NET Framework, and OLE DB. Plus, GRIDSCALE can now simultaneously manage multiple SQL Server instances using popular tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

The latest version of GRIDSCALE also includes:

• An entirely new Cluster Lock Manager that coordinates row-level transactions across disparate database servers for enhanced performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) applications
• Automatic recovery of database failures without IT intervention
• Automatic recovery for clients that need seamless access across data centers
• Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008