Virtualization.com

News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Robin Wauters

Innotas Hires New Product Development, Marketing Execs

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Innotas, a provider of cloud solutions for IT management, has announced that Cliff McBride and Joerg Koehler have joined the company as SVP of Product Development and Director of Marketing, respectively.

McBride will be responsible for the product roadmap, engineering, development, and delivery of support tools needed for this stage of Innotas’ growth and expansion to serve its increasing customer base.

Prior to joining Innotas, Cliff McBride led the development activities for Autonomy’s Interwoven business unit where he managed the team responsible for web content management solutions. McBride also spent 11 years with Boeing and IBM developing geospatial software and managing teams working on classified intelligence projects for the U.S. Air Force.

Koehler is an international marketing professional with over 13 years of experience. Koehler will lead the corporate and product marketing activities at Innotas.

Prior to joining Innotas, Joerg Koehler oversaw worldwide corporate and product marketing as Director of Global Marketing at Neocase Software. Additionally, he held key roles in marketing at Canto Software, GlobalEnglish Corporation, and Intershop Communications.

Citrix Reaches For The Cloud.com, Acquires Cloud Computing Startup For A Reported $200 Million+

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Citrix this morning announced that it has acquired Cloud.com, a provider of software infrastructure platforms for cloud providers. The company’s CloudStack product line helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that Citrix paid more than $200 million for the cloud computing startup.

Also read: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com: An Analysis from CloudAve

Industry analysts expect a massive build out in cloud infrastructure, creating a new market projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2013.

The Cloud.com product line is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top. It is a hypervisor-agnostic solution designed from the ground up to help providers build clouds the way the world’s largest and most successful public clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient.

With the addition of Cloud.com, Citrix now offers a complete portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for what it dubs the ‘Cloud Era’. The Cloud.com product line will continue to support commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen. Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of “platform-as-a-service” development environments, storage systems, servers and management software.

As a founding member of Openstack.org, Citrix is the second largest contributor to the project and is a member of the OpenStack policy board. Citrix product support for OpenStack was initially announced at the recent Citrix Synergy conference under the code name “Project Olympus.”

With this acquisition, Citrix will also be extending OpenStack support to the Cloud.com product line in an upcoming release later this year.

Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang will continue to lead the design, architecture and technology of the CloudStack product line, reporting to Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of the newly-formed Cloud Platforms product group at Citrix.

The Cloud.com CloudStack solution is available to cloud providers today, with Citrix branded versions coming in a future release.

Release: EMC Atmos 2.0

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EMC Corporation today announced EMC Atmos 2.0 and EMC Atmos GeoDrive software are now generally available and shipping.

Atmos 2.0 (with its EMC Atmos GeoParity feature)—provides customers with efficient management of globally distributed big data and cloud storage environments.

EMC is now shipping new features that help customers better manage big data and object storage:

– Stores object segments rather than entire objects across distributed storage environments for unmatched protection.

– Provides transparent access to the cloud.

The new EMC Atmos GeoDrive is a secure and fast way for Windows users and applications to gain cloud access. The new software enables customers to simply install, and in a matter of minutes, transparently begin moving data to the cloud.

Gartner: Global IT Spending To Grow 7.1 Percent In 2011

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Worldwide IT spending is on pace to grow 7.1 percent in 2011, according to the latest quarterly spending outlook by Gartner. Analysts have revised overall IT forecast spending growth in U.S. dollar terms, up from their first quarter update, when they projected 5.6 percent growth for 2011.

“It is a bit surprising that we have not seen a more significant impact on our global IT spending forecast as a results of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, but despite widespread concerns about disruptions to the supply of critical components in the initial aftermath of the natural disaster, there has not been a dramatic impact on overall IT spending,” said Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner.

“For 2011 as a whole, we expect Japan IT spending to be down in local currency, but we expect a positive growth trend to emerge in the second half of the year and continue into 2012.”

Global IT services is forecast to reach $846 billion in 2011, a 6.6 percent increase from 2010. The computing and hardware segment is poised for the strongest growth with spending forecast to grow 11.7 percent in 2011.

Gartner’s latest forecast found that worldwide public cloud services spending is to total $89 billion in 2011, up from $74 billion in 2010. The market is forecast to reach $177 billion by 2015.

However, to put this growth in context, Gartner analysts said public cloud services spending was only about 2 percent of global IT spending in 2010, and by 2015 the level of spending on public cloud services will be less than 5 percent of the total spent on IT overall.

Extreme Networks Names David Ginsburg As Chief Marketing Officer

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Extreme Networks today announced that it has named communications industry veteran David Ginsburg as its Chief Marketing Officer. Paul Hooper, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, has resigned and will be leaving the company to pursue other interests.

Ginsburg joined Extreme Networks in December 2010, when he was appointed to lead strategic marketing, product portfolio definition, and vertical solutions marketing.

As CMO, Ginsburg expands his role to take on the full mantle of global marketing activities for the company, and will be responsible for all aspects of corporate marketing, product management, solutions marketing, and outbound communications activities.

Ginsburg has held key marketing positions at communications companies such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, and at start-up companies including Allegro Networks, Shasta and Innopath.

As senior vice president of worldwide marketing and product management for Riverstone Networks, he led the efforts to drive global branding and field marketing, coupled with key product differentiation, to focus on driving revenue and winning market share in the Ethernet market.

ChangeBASE Now Covers Microsoft Windows Desktop Virtualization Technologies

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ChangeBASE, which provides automated application compatibility testing and remediation solutions, has created a new application compatibility tool for companies considering moving to a session virtualization or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment with Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services (RDS).

The AOK Tool helps to determine which applications will work optimally in a server-hosted desktop virtualization environment on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Using the AOK Tool together with the recently launched ChangeBASE reporting rules and plug-ins for RDS which have been developed together with Microsoft makes it easier to find out which applications will work out of the box and which ones may experience issues.

RDS is one of the core virtualisation technologies available in Windows Server 2008 R2.

In addition to the traditional session virtualisation scenario (formerly known as Terminal Services), RDS has expanded its role to provide an extensible platform for VDI.

RDS, which separates where the desktop or application is used from where it is run, accelerates desktop & application deployments and improves remote worker efficiency, while helping to keep critical intellectual property secure and to simplify regulatory compliance.