Robin Wauters

SpringSource, a division of VMware, today unveiled a new website, TomcatExpert.com, a professionally managed Apache Tomcat resource library and community.

Developers, system administrators and web operations professionals that develop and operate Apache Tomcat can now obtain information from both committers and recognized leaders of Apache Tomcat.

Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used Java application server. SpringSource employees are responsible for 95 percent of the bug fixes to Apache Tomcat in the past two years and many Tomcat problem incidents are often identified and resolved by SpringSource before they reach the community forums, resulting in a 97 percent renewal rate for Tomcat support.

TomcatExpert.com was created by SpringSource, the leading provider of support, training and services for Apache technologies, including Apache Tomcat. The website is operated by development operations experts inside SpringSource and includes content from various experts across multiple industries. TomcatExpert.com is expected to be the single best resource for developers and operators who are running Apache Tomcat in large scale production environments. In addition to a deep knowledgebase of articles, this site includes discussions surrounding best practices, troubleshooting and the technology applications of the Apache Tomcat application server.

In addition to announcing TomcatExpert.com, SpringSource also recently introduced SpringSource tc Server Spring Edition, the best place to build and run Spring applications. Based on the popular Apache Tomcat server, tc Server Spring Edition provides a lightweight platform for running modern applications and is ideally-suited for the modern virtualized datacenter as well as internal and external cloud environments. The tc Server Spring Edition bridges the divide between development teams and IT operations by equipping them with tools to manage the health, performance and quality of their Spring applications. SpringSource tc Server 2.0 is expected to be generally available in early April 2010.

Virtual Bridges, makers of the VERDE suite for desktop management and provisioning, today announced the immediate availability of VERDE Hosted,  powered by Rackspace. This new offering provides the first and most comprehensive hosted desktop virtualization solution for VDI, disconnected, and branch-office desktop users worldwide.

Complementing Virtual Bridges’ VERDE On-premise desktop virtualization, VERDE Hosted addresses an organization’s unique requirements for infrastructure, CAPEX and OPEX budgets, and payment options. VERDE Hosted is specifically targeted for customers that do not want to incur the upfront CAPEX costs of deploying a Desktop Virtualization solution.

VERDE Hosted can further drive down total cost of ownership (TCO) beyond VERDE On-premise, today nearly 40 percent lower than any competing solution. VERDE Hosted and VERDE On-premise both offer virtual desktops in VDI, disconnected and branch-office modes.

According to industry analysts, interest in hosted desktop virtualization is increasingly attractive to organizations mandated with Desktop TCO (both CAPEX and OPEX) reductions. Gartner estimates that about 15 percent of professional desktop PCs will migrate to hosted desktop virtualization by 2014, effecting approximately 66 million connected machines. Coupled with upgrade cycles accelerated by Windows 7 availability, many companies will pass on costly hardware upgrades, opting for hosted desktop virtualization to deliver the new operating systems to their users.

All VERDE Hosted editions come with the complete VERDE Suite, and a Rackspace managed and dedicated infrastructure including a Cisco firewall and VPN, IDS (only in Platinum), physical servers, and internal storage. Gold and Platinum editions also come up with industry leading NetApp storage solutions for reliable and efficient storage for Gold Master images and user data.

Organizations can also choose a custom configuration to meet their needs. Customers with an on-premise desktop virtualization solution can augment their infrastructure with VERDE Hosted to use for disaster recovery, or to support external or remote users.

Today’s announcement underscores the commitment of Virtual Bridges to provide its global customers with a partner ecosystem comprised of the world’s most successful solution providers.

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.