Virtualization.com

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

Robin Wauters

NX Announces Virtual Hosting Service Contract for Special Olympics

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INX announced today that it has started its Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for the production IT environment of Special Olympics Northern California.

Special Olympics Northern California (SONC) is like many businesses – too small to cost effectively implement and manage its own data center virtual infrastructure, but too big to ignore the inefficiencies and high costs of maintaining a physical infrastructure. As a result, they turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for their server and desktop provisioning, all of which were converted to virtual machines and are now hosted at INX’s data center facility in Sacramento, California.

SpringSource Partners Up With VMware For Spring-Powered Enterprise Virtualization Offering

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SpringSource today announced at SpringOne Americas 2008 a new relationship with VMware that will help organizations to seamlessly develop and deploy Spring applications in VMware virtualized environments.

The collaboration with VMware, a SpringSource Certified Solutions Partner, includes integration between SpringSource Tool Suite, an Eclipse-powered development environment for building enterprise applications using the Spring Portfolio, and VMware Workstation to enable the dynamic creation of virtual machines on developer desktops.

SpringSource is also developing two open source application-server virtual appliances – the SpringSource tc Server and dm Server virtual appliances. When run on VMware Infrastructure, these appliances will enable the portability of enterprise Java applications across desktop and data center environments. SpringSource dm Server is a completely modular, OSGi-based Java server designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability. SpringSource tc Server is the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat – the most widely used Java application server – hardened for enterprise use and coupled with mission-critical operational capabilities and support that systems administrators require.

SpringSource Tool Suite integration with VMware Workstation will enable development and QA professionals to quickly and easily specify virtual server configurations for different development and test scenarios. These virtual appliances will allow developers to select a variety of build targets with different operating systems and application server configurations without needing additional physical hardware – dramatically accelerating software development times and reducing hardware costs. Virtual appliance configuration, deployment and debugging will be integrated with the SpringSource Tool Suite, and ready-to-use virtual images will be provided for dm Server, tc Server and Apache Tomcat.

The first SpringSource/VMware commercial offerings are scheduled for availability in January 2009.

Tideway Releases Foundation 7.2

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Tideway today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation 7.2. The latest version of Tideway’s automated discovery and application dependency mapping software aggregates critical hardware reference and software end-of-life data traditionally spread across multiple vendors and asset management systems. The new features give organizations a single platform from which to analyze power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and ensure end-of-life, unsupported software is not being used in production applications.

Foundation 7.2 also delivers enhanced capabilities to track end-of-life dates to manage data center software through the entire lifecycle, from introduction to retirement, and reduce the support costs and business risks for aging software. It combines automatically discovered data about software versions in the environment with known end-of-life information from vendors to track software aging on an ongoing basis. Users can ensure standardization and compliance and avoid costly fees by having end-of-life, end-of-support and end-of-extended-support information easily accessible and mapped to precisely where the software exists in the data center.

Both the expanded hardware reference data and end-of-life tracking in Foundation 7.2 are powered by Tideway’s Knowledge Update Service (TKU), a continuously updated, community-directed library of configuration information that catalogs software and hardware assets and business applications running in data centers.

Additionally, Foundation 7.2 includes new dynamic discovery extensions that enhance the flexibility of the platform. Users can build custom extensions to Foundation independent of Tideway product release cycles to address their own unique IT environment. Foundation 7.2 ships with a pre-built extension for database discovery. This extension identifies the structures and data within any JDBC-supported database, understands dependencies on specific database tables, and dynamically references non-discoverable data held in database tables, such as physical locations or ownership.

Tideway Foundation 7.2 will be generally available in January, 2009.

Beta Release: Virtual Computer NxTop

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“We are celebrating a major milestone at Virtual Computer this week, as we now have our first NxTop beta customer up and running.”

Those are the first words of the blog post announcing the first NxTop beta integration from Virtual Computer, a startup that was in stealth mode until they launched last August.

You can register for the beta program here if you would like to learn more.

Kaseya Announces Upgraded Backup / Disaster Recovery And Endpoint Security Modules

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Kaseya announced today the release of two new versions of its popular Kaseya Endpoint Security (KES) and Backup and Disaster Recovery (BU-DR) modules. The new releases offer significant automation capabilities for fast deployment and efficient utilization of IT resources.

The endpoint security module provides integration for unified deployment and management of anti-virus, anti-spyware and rootkit protection for Microsoft OS-based servers, workstations and mobile computers. KES is integrated at both the user interface and database levels with Kaseya’s complete suite of IT automation software, providing for seamless operation and eliminating complexity.
This allows users to automate IT management and have full visibility of all deployment, configuration, status and operations of endpoint security, all within Kaseya’s unified and consistent Web-based console.
The new backup and disaster recovery functionality now includes Incremental Forever and Synthetic Full Backups for efficient offsite replication and user-defined archival capabilities. In addition, new features for Instant Virtualization allow any backup to be converted to a VMware, ESX or Virtual PC virtual disk remotely and automatically within minutes. This is an enormous time-saver that significantly eases the restoration process. With just a few clicks, customers can instantly have a key system up and running in a virtual environment. This makes it possible to recover files and folders in real time to an existing machine, to a “bare metal” machine, or to a virtual machine.

Kaseya Endpoint Security 2.0 and Backup and Disaster Recovery 3.0 are available immediately.

Gartner Analysts: Virtualization Will Be Disruptive For Server And Storage Vendors

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This comes from the 27th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, which opened at the MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas: virtualization is proving to be a disruptive trend for server and storage vendors, according to Gartner analysts.

“Virtualization should be seen as not just a tool for (server) consolidation, but as a modernization catalyst,” said Thomas Bittman, a Gartner VP and Chief of Research for its Infrastructure and operations area. “It’s changing how we deal with the business.”

As DataCenterKnowledge points out, Bittman foresees the emergence of a “meta operating system” – a virtualization layer between applications and distributed computing resources that will play a central role in the next-generation data center.

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