News

Unidesk today announced the general availability of Unidesk 1.0.

Unidesk leverages VMware vSphere and extends virtual desktop solutions such as VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop with 100 percent personalization for end users, together with single image management and storage savings for IT organizations.

Unidesk offers:

• 100% Personalization – Drives end user acceptance of virtual desktops by sustaining all user customizations – including user-installed applications, profile customizations, and documents – through desktop logouts, reboots, and operating system updates;
• Effortless Management – Enables IT administrators to efficiently create and update many desktops from single images of Microsoft Windows and applications, including applications with system services and boot-time drivers that application virtualization solutions cannot deliver;
• Storage Savings – Shrinks the amount of storage needed to implement desktop virtualization by preventing duplicate copies of Microsoft Windows and IT-managed applications from being stored.

Alliance and channel partners have also been anticipating the launch of Unidesk, which provides a key solution to help customers realize greater returns on virtual desktop investments.

Unidesk Composite Virtualization technology is the patent-pending layering innovation that gives both end users and IT ideal virtual desktops. All user customizations are captured and stored separately in personalization layers. Microsoft Windows and applications such as Microsoft Office are created and maintained by IT in separate operating system and application layers.

By dynamically compositing these layers at boot time, Unidesk ensures that every desktop has the same set of patched and compliant base layers, while every user has a consistent, personal desktop and application experience.

Unidesk 1.0 is available immediately through Unidesk Solution Partners who are experts in VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft solutions. Pricing starts at $150 per named user and decreases with volume.

Dögel IT-Management proudly announces the first Tech Preview for its own Application Virtualization Solution Evalaze. By using Evalaze, Dögel will make the life of IT Managers much easier.

You can run applications without the need to install them and to make Windows 7 migration easier.

It is free of charge for private use and can also be used to make applications portable.

The release of the Evalaze Version 0.8 shows the most important steps in the development process of the solution. Like other solutions on the market, Evalaze generates a sandbox on the host PC that makes applications run in their own environment – independent from the underlying operating system.

The sandbox contains its own registry and file system environment – the application will perform changes only to the sandbox and not to the underlying operating system. It enables you a Software Distribution without the need to install applications locally by running the application only in the virtual environment without any effects to the underlying operating system.

Dögel IT”s target is to enable SMB customers to profit from the elegant deployment way for application virtualization, especially for customers who don”t have the budget to buy existing solutions.

Virtual Computer, the market leader in distributed desktop virtualization, today announced that its groundbreaking NxTop desktop virtualization solution is now available as a free product download.

The free download bundle includes NxTop Engine, Virtual Computer’s innovative ‘bare-metal’ client hypervisor, as well as the NxTop Center, a feature-rich management console that enables a wide array of advanced virtual desktop creation and management functions.

This new pricing model enables corporate IT teams, VARs, and PC enthusiasts to use the complete NxTop product suite, managing up to five PCs without any licensing fees or time-based evaluation restrictions.

NxTop Engine boasts features such as:

• Hardware compatibility, including support for newer Intel vPro enabled systems as well as a wide array of corporate workhorse models dating back to early 2007.
• A one-of-a-kind symmetric graphics architecture, compatible with numerous Intel and NVIDIA graphics processor models, that delivers equivalent graphics performance across multiple virtual machines without the need to install hardware-specific drivers.
• A robust collection of platform control and convenience functions, including platform suspend and resume, dynamic or user-specified memory allocation, power management profiles, fully-configurable wired and wireless networking modes, and many other advanced functions.
• Integrated, full disk encryption.
• Broad USB support including the ability to leverage native Windows USB drivers.

NxTop  pairs a client hypervisor with a complete management suite capable of managing both the hypervisor itself and the virtual desktops running on it.

Free download users may take advantage of a rich set of NxTop Center management capabilities, including:

• Point-and-click virtual desktop creation and provisioning.
• Efficient, one-to-many system patching.
• Seamless backup and restore of user-specific personalization and data layers.
• Granular security and policy controls, including time-based expiration, policy-based lockout, USB filtering, and remote wipe.

NetApp today announced SANscreen 6.0, the latest edition of its storage management solution, to enable service providers and enterprises to optimize storage efficiency and performance across their entire virtualized infrastructures.

SANscreen 6.0 is now also fully integrated with BMC Software’s Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This combined offering gives customers the ability to extend their IT service management solutions to the storage domain for increased visibility, control, and efficiency.

SANscreen 6.0 not only builds on its ability to manage large-scale heterogeneous environments, it now manages NetApp-only storage environments too. This helps customers to intelligently measure and control their virtual infrastructure and optimize capacity utilization, availability, and performance.

In fact, at least one customer reports having realized combined capital expenditure, operational expenditure, and service quality savings of more than $850,000 annually with SANscreen.

The integration of SANscreen with BMC Atrium CMDB plays an integral role in the transformation to a service-oriented IT infrastructure. BMC Cloud Service Management leverages the complete view and analysis of the environment in the BMC Atrium CMDB to quickly provision services and accurately remediate service-level degradation, saving time and money by improving service levels.

The SANscreen product suite offers end-to-end infrastructure discovery, service-level monitoring, analytics (planning, forecasting, and chargeback), change management, and impact analysis for virtual infrastructures affecting storage efficiency and optimization. SANscreen enables customers to manage storage as a true end-to-end IT service, which reduces capital and operational costs, increases efficiency, and improves application service quality (availability and performance).

Furthermore, the SANscreen detailed analytics help customers reallocate storage as needed, identify storage hot spots, and plan for and adapt to changing business goals.

All customer pricing for products described is available from NetApp sales or reseller partners. SANscreen 6.0 is available today.

SeaMicro, a Silicon Valley pioneer of low power server technology, today emerged from stealth mode to launch a new Internet-optimized x86-server that reduces by 75 percent the power and space used by servers.

In development for three years, the SM10000 is the ultimate re-think of the volume server.

Specifically optimized for the workloads and traffic patterns of the Internet, SeaMicro’s SM10000 integrates 512 Intel Atom processors with Ethernet switching, server management and application load-balancing to create a “plug and play” standards-based server that dramatically reduces power draw and footprint without requiring any modifications to existing software.

The key benefits of the SM10000 include:

• using one-quarter of the power and taking one-quarter of the space to do the same work as the best-in-class volume server,
• industry leading density: 2,048 central processing units (CPUs) per standard rack,
• drop–in adoption by running off-the-shelf OSs and applications without change,
• flexible architecture that can support any CPU.

Reports from Google show that if current power trends continue, the cost of energy consumed by a server during its lifetime could surpass the initial purchase cost.

In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that volume servers consume more than one percent of the total electricity in the US—representing billions of dollars in wasted operating expense each year.

SeaMicro invented and patented a new technique in CPU I/O virtualization, which dramatically reduces non-CPU power draw by eliminating 90 percent of the components from the motherboard. This CPU I/O virtualization allows SeaMicro to shrink a server motherboard from the size of a pizza box to the size of a credit card.

SeaMicro designed a supercomputer-style interconnect fabric that can link 512 mini-motherboards into a single system with an order-of-magnitude reduction in power draw and space. This fabric provides 1.28 terabits per-second throughput, with complete security and redundancy.

Additionally, the architecture can support any CPU instruction set and any protocol, including Ethernet, fibre channel, and data center Ethernet.
SeaMicro also invented Dynamic Compute Allocation Technology (DCAT). DCAT combines CPU management and load balancing, allowing the SM10000 to dynamically allocate workloads to specific CPUs on the basis of power-usage metrics. This ensures that the active CPUs operate in the most energy-efficient utilization ranges.In addition, DCAT technology enables compute pooling—allowing the user to create pools of compute for a given application. This enables the user to dynamically add compute resources to the pool based on predefined utilization thresholds.

The SM10000 simplifies data center operations and management by eliminating layers of switches, terminal servers and load-balancing devices. The system is built on standards-based x86 CPUs, which means it is plug and play – customers can deploy the SM10000 without modifications to existing operating systems, application software or management tools.

SeaMicro’s SM10000 system is comprised of:

• 512 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors
• 1 terabyte of DRAM
• 0 – 64 SATA solid state or hard disk drives
• 8 – 64 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks; or 2 – 16 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks
• The entire system is 10 rack units tall (17.5 inches tall).

SeaMicro was founded by industry veterans with expertise in building large data centers and cluster computers.They come from leading technology companies including Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The company has raised $25 million from strategic partners and venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital. SeaMicro was also awarded a $9.3 million grant from the Department of Energy, which was the largest grant awarded to a server company in the Information and Communication Technology Sector.

The SeaMicro SM10000 will be generally available July 30, 2010 in the U.S. and select international locations. The list price for a base configuration is $139,000.

Leostream, developer of virtual hosted desktop software, today announced the Leostream Connection Broker has been verified as Citrix Ready by Citrix Systems, Inc. for XenServer 5.6.

The Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that are recommended to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix.

The Leostream Connection Broker is the industry’s most widely deployed vendor-independent connection broker, integrating the complex array of clients, back-end systems and protocols required for successful enterprise virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. The Leostream Connection Broker underwent a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with the enterprise-class, cloud-proven Citrix XenServer 5.6 virtualization platform.

The Citrix Ready program makes it easy for customers to identify complementary products and solutions that can enhance Citrix environments. Having successfully passed Citrix Ready testing, customers can trust that the Leostream Connection Broker will work effectively with XenServer 5.6 in order to create a reliable, scalable and robust VDI.