News

Virtual Bridges Upgrades Win4Lin Desktop, Releases Win4Solaris Desktop 5

June 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Bridges announced today the release of a major upgrade to its Win4Lin Desktop product and a specially priced edition for Ubuntu users. Version 5 of its desktop virtualization system features performance increases that it claims beat the likes of VMware Workstation and other competitors in the growing desktop virtualization market.

Win4Lin Desktop 5 is based on code that has been re-engineered since 2005, when the assets of the former company NeTraverse were acquired to form Win4Lin, now renamed Virtual Bridges. The new verison includes support for 64-bit Linux and its architecture capable of interfacing with KVM.

Virtual Bridges has created a special Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition, which they are offering for $29.99.

These are the major Features of Win4Lin Desktop Products, according to the news release:

Runs virtually all Windows applications from Microsoft, Intuit, Adobe, and most others, including in-house developed applications
Compatible with the latest Linux desktops (Ubuntu, Fedora, Open SuSE, Mandriva, and more)
A new Win4Lin Console for easy installation, backup, and management of Windows sessions
Share files and documents between Windows and Linux applications
Seamless printing from Windows
Easy access to files on flash drives, memory sticks, and digital photo cameras from Windows
Run Windows as a “desktop-in-a-box”, full-screen, or as “floating applications”
No need to understand complex virtual machine technology – Win4Lin does all the work for you

Win4Lin Desktop is being offered to users in two editions, Win4Lin Desktop 5 Ubuntu Edition and Win4Lin Desktop 5 Pro Edition. It is a no-cost update for Win4Lin Pro 4.5 users and is available here.

The company has also released Win4Solaris Desktop 5, also in two editions; Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Home Edition and Win4Solaris Desktop 5 Pro Edition.

Virtualization Picking Up More Steam in Asia Pacific

June 6, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Research from Springboard had already estimated the virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific to reach $ 1.35 billion with CAGR of 42 % by 2010, here’s another indication that Asia is poised to become the biggest growth market for virtualization in the future, particularly with financial institutions.

According to The Asian Banker, the Asia Pacific region is now adopting virtualization technology at a faster rate than the U.S. -14 percent of companies in Asia plan to implement virtualization in the next 12 months, compared with 12 percent of companies in America says Forrester.

According to Jim Lenox, VMware’s South Asia general manager, the motivation for adopting virtualization has varied significantly across Asia’s banking sector, with consolidation and cost savings as the “first-step” goal.

“After the organization achieves some experience running virtual machines, we generally see them expanding their usage of virtualization largely due to the agility and flexibility that comes with running applications inside of easy-to-create virtual machines.”

Virtualization is often cited as one of the solutions to improve banks’ disaster recovery capabilities, an issue that has come into the spotlight following recent trauma in China and Myanmar.

Virtual Iron Teams Up With Quantum

June 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Iron today announced full qualification across Quantum’s DXi-Series disk backup family of de-duplication and replication solutions and its Scalar line of intelligent tape libraries. The announcement coincides with the recent general availability release of the DXi7500, Quantum’s flagship disk backup system.

Virtual Iron provides server virtualization capabilities on an infrastructure-friendly architecture. The platform combines an open source hypervisor with virtualization services and policy-based capabilities for intelligent failover and dynamic workload management. Quantum specializes in backup, recovery and archive, providing a comprehensive portfolio of integrated disk, tape, de-duplication and multi-site replication solutions under common management.

More information about the joint solutions offered by Virtual Iron and Quantum are available on this website.

[Source: Businesswire]

Kroll Ontrack Lets You Recover Data From VMware Systems

June 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Kroll Ontrack, a provider of data recovery and legal technologies products and services, today issued a news release claiming it is the first company able to perform data recovery services on VMware systems.

In essence, Kroll Ontrack conceived and developed capabilities specifically designed to recover folders and files on all types of virtual systems. This capability provides businesses with a viable resource when data loss occurs in these environments.

Specifically, Kroll Ontrack can successfully recover lost data on the following VMware systems:

* VMware Infrastructure 2 & 3 (ESX Server, VMFS)
* VMware Server – http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/server-recovery/
* VMware Workstation (all versions)

[Source: iTWire]

rPath’s High Profile Customers: U.S. Department of Energy and CERN

June 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

rPath, which develops a technology aimed to simplify application distribution and management through virtual appliances, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have been using rBuilder to deliver virtual appliances to both scientists’ desktops and computational clouds. The use of rBuilder in these environments is supposed to reduce the effort required to support users and allows researchers to take advantage of underutilized computational resources.

CERN turned to virtual appliances to facilitate the analysis of data created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The complete software environment needed by the LHC applications is assembled by rBuilder and distributed to run as a virtual machine on physicists’ desktops. Virtual appliances provide a consistent application environment for the LHC applications while, at the same time, allowing scientists to use their desktops for analysis, regardless of operating system.

rPath’s other high-profile customer, the DOE, is exploring the concept of using virtual appliances to provide customized environments for scientific applications. Scientific applications are turned into virtual appliances using rPath’s rBuilder. The “Science Clouds” project provides resources capable of hosting multiple scientific appliances using the Globus Virtual Workspaces software. Scientists submit their virtual appliances to any available resource, knowing that the application environment is controlled and isolated from the underlying system. By relying on portable appliances, the scientists can leverage the resources of science clouds, and seamlessly move to commercial providers, such as Amazon’s EC2, when additional resources are needed.

[Source: GridToday]

VMware, Oracle and CA Newest DMTF Board Members

June 4, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced the addition of three new companies to its board of directors. VMware, Oracle and CA step up to the board level – joining industry heavyweights like AMD, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and othrs – to help drive the overall direction, strategy and activity of DMTF.

Together, the board of directors will collaborate to set cross-industry priorities, promote interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments, foster alliance partnerships, and lead the organization’s committee work.

Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture for VMware will join DMTF as board representative.