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Nortel Introduces “Office-On-A-Stick”

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Nortel has unveiled a business solution that gives road warriors an ‘office-on-a-stick’ using a specially-formatted USB key for Windows PCs that automates business network access when inserted and protects information and applications by completely removing them when the USB key is removed. The solution – called Nortel Secure Portable Office – combines hardware, software and services to provide simple, secure network access for remote workers.

When the Secure Portable Office USB key is inserted into a Windows PC, user identity is first authenticated. Then a secure network connection is established through Nortel VPN Gateway . Finally, a ‘Virtual Desktop’ is launched, presenting the user with a menu of authorized network applications. An automatic scan for viruses and out-of-date or malicious software can also be configured.

All data and applications are encrypted, both in transit and on the PC. When the USB key is removed, the complete Secure Portable Office environment – including all confidential data and applications – is automatically removed. This helps ensure regulatory compliance by protecting sensitive information that could otherwise be exposed on a lost or stolen laptop.

What separates Secure Portable Office from competitive offerings are the upfront services Nortel provides to help organizations tailor solutions to their own unique requirements. This can include everything from application, security and business continuity needs assessment to network architecture and security policy consulting and solution training.

Nortel Networks
[Source: GigaOM]

What’s “Persystent Virtualization”?

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Persystent Technologies today introduced Persystent Virtualization, a new solution that eases deployment, maintenance and control over virtual desktop environments, while providing end users with greater personalization of their virtual desktops.

Persystent Virtualization automatically protects and enforces the desired state of every virtual desktop in an organization, eliminating the need for IT to continually reconfigure desktops. End users can customize their virtual desktop within enforced corporate configuration standards. This gives them the look and feel of having their own personal computer, a first for virtual desktop users. By enabling personalized virtual desktops, including address books, desktop short cuts, wallpaper and other custom settings, Persystent eases the transition from traditional to virtualized computing.
Persystent Virtualization automatically restores any corrupted operating system, registry, application or setting to ensure compliance with corporate policy guidelines and governance requirements for improved service levels and business continuity. Persystent also eases the process of software patches by capturing the updated image and deploying it to every desktop. In the case of defective patches, Persystent can redeploy a previous configuration within 30 seconds.

TBD Networks Goes For Full DataCenter Virtualization With TBDVirtualFabric-VME

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TBDVirtualFabric-VMware Edition (VME) provides the missing pieces for companies to realize the full benefits of Datacenter Virtualization by unifying physical and virtual firewalls and network infrastructure. TBDVirtualFabric-VME was specifically designed to provide a virtual fabric of networking, security, and firewall capabilities to scale VMware environments beyond current limitations.

“TBDVirtualFabric-VME naturally extends the benefits that VMware and VMotion create in current virtual environments,” commented Thomas Ludwig, CEO of TBD Networks. “It delivers benefits of full Datacenter Virtualization within minutes of installation. TBDVirtualFabric-VME automatically discovers the entire physical and virtual network (including firewalls, switches and VLANs), and gives administrators an intuitive GUI to define network topologies, high-availability and security policies. The result is a virtualized environment that complies with enterprise standards and scales to large deployments without giving up on the flexibility of datacenter-wide VMotion.”

TBDVirtualFabric-VME helps companies maximize their return on investment from Datacenter Virtualization efforts. It reduces networking bottlenecks, especially in multi vendor networks (supporting leading vendors such as Cisco, Foundry and Juniper), without compromising security by reducing hardware requirements, and improving the utilization of existing hardware and network links. TBDVirtualFabric-VME permits companies to provision, manage, and reconfigure networks at the speed of business. In addition to improved network performance, availability, and QoS, it can simultaneously help companies reduce security risks and network threats.

TBDVirtualFabric-VME is currently available in beta.

Solidcore S3 Control Software Now Supports VMware ESX

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Solidcore Systems, who specializes in change audit and configuration control, today announced its S3 Control software detects and validates change events to VMware environments in real time. Unlike previous methods that relied on multiple scan-based tools to manage change, the S3 Control software reconciles change events in real time from both virtual and physical infrastructures with an enterprise change management process.

Solidcore S3 Control eases the burden of managing the multitude of change events across virtualized systems by tracking changes on VMware ESX servers and virtual consoles in real time, alerting and reporting on change events, and correlating changes to authorization. All change events can be reconciled with an existing change management system, including HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli Service Desk.

Solidcore S3 Control captures “who” is making changes, “what” is being changed, “when” change is occurring, “how” the change was implemented, and “where” the change was made. This enables IT organizations to ensure deployed virtual and physical systems are always in a known and verified state. Solidcore can track changes to user roles and permissions, data stores attached to ESX hosts, high-availability configurations, Virtual Machine (VM) templates, resource pools, scheduled tasks, and guest VMs. Solidcore can also identify new users that have been created, edited or deleted, new hosts added to VMware VirtualCenter, and license server events in virtual systems. S3 Control validates these changes against the change management system, where any changes with a corresponding ticket are marked “authorized” and the change management system is updated with the current change information. Changes that occur without a matching ticket are immediately identified for review.

Solidcore’s support for VMware ESX is available today in the latest release of the Solidcore S3 Control software.

Solidcore Systems

[Source: Businesswire]

DTMF Accepts Draft Specification for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

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The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) today announced the acceptance of a draft specification submitted by leading virtualization companies (VMware, Oracle and CA recently joined the task force) targeting an industry standard format for portable virtual machines. Virtual machines packaged in this format can be installed on any virtualization platform that supports the standard simplifying interoperability, security and virtual machine lifecycle management for virtual infrastructures.

The companies behind the collaboration on this specification include Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource. This group of virtualization industry leaders has submitted the specification to the DMTF for development into an industry standard. DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF will continue to develop this technology into a successful, open industry standard and promote it worldwide.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), uses existing packaging tools to combine one or more virtual machines together with a standards-based XML wrapper, giving the virtualization platform a portable package containing all required installation and configuration parameters for the virtual machines. This allows any virtualization platform that implements the standard to correctly install and run the virtual machines.

(IBM recently announced its open-ovf project.)

Most importantly, OVF specifies procedures and technologies to permit integrity checking of the virtual machines (VM) to ensure that they have not been modified since the package was produced. This enhances the security of the format and will alleviate security concerns of users who adopt virtual appliances produced by third parties. OVF also provides mechanisms that support license checking for the enclosed VMs, addressing a key concern of both independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers. Finally, OVF allows an installed VM to acquire information about its host virtualization platform and run-time environment, which allows the VM to localize the applications it contains and optimize its performance for the particular virtualization environment.

In addition to providing portability, integrity, and configurability of existing virtual hard disk formats. OVF is also extensible to support future developments of virtual hard disk formats whose specifications are openly available.

NetIQ Survey Results Reflect Lack of Virtualization Management Basics

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As the adoption rate of virtualization technology increases, organizations face new management challenges arising from hybrid physical and virtual infrastructures. While companies turn to virtualization to reduce IT expense and increase service capacity, a recent study conducted by NetIQ revealed that very few companies are taking the necessary steps to extend systems management basics to ensure application performance, service availability and end user experience across this complex hybrid environment. As a result, they risk offsetting the many benefits and ultimate cost savings virtualization technology promises.

Comprised of feedback from over 1,000 respondents within more than 800 different government, enterprise and small-to-medium organizations worldwide, only 21 percent of 759 respondents currently deploying virtualization have any kind of systems management solution for their virtual infrastructure. Overall, survey responses demonstrate that:

  • Approximately 27 percent are managing the performance and availability of their virtual systems with the same tools they utilize on their physical servers;
  • Just 17 percent are simply monitoring the virtual hardware or the operating system; and
  • Only 10 percent are proactively gauging end-user response time while 15 percent are simply considering it.

The survey also revealed that 40 percent of respondents are not reporting on the performance of their virtualized applications, hardware, operating systems, or their virtual machines in any measurable way. This prevents them from managing capacity, avoiding impending outages and collecting additional critical data that can help ensure business continuity.

By not extending application and end-user response time monitoring to virtual systems and hybrid environments, organizations have little visibility into IT service performance and limited accuracy in gauging an end users’ experience with those services. This limits the ability of IT to fulfill service level agreements (SLAs), threatens process continuity and minimizes the potential return on virtualization investments.

NetIQ