News

Pivot3 announced two new core products and enhancements to its full suite of scalable storage solutions today.

Pivot3 also unveiled the HardBank server, a ruggedized version of the MiniBank that is ideal for military, air-constrained and mobile applications that experience harsh environments with extreme dust, vibration and heat.

The Pivot3 MiniBank server individually handles up to 70 cameras with 2 – 8TB of RAID storage supporting VMS applications from more than 30 open systems partners. MiniBanks are easily configured together to support larger camera counts with up to 48TB of shared SAN storage and embedded VMS failover protection. It is designed for distributed environments typically found in retail, financial, educational and corporate markets.

The HardBank and MiniBank are both powered by the latest Intel Nehalem CPUs, which double VMS performance through the use of hyper-threading and pipelining. Both products are backed by Pivot3 world-class service and support, configuration assistance, and a three-year warranty.

The company also announced that a new Surveillance Feature Pack would be included free of charge with all systems. The Feature Pack includes RAID 6x, which protects data in the case of five simultaneous drive failures; a Recording Interruption Alarm that alerts users if displayed video is not being recorded; and Predictive Drive Sparing, which pre-emptively identifies bad drives before they fail.

Pivot3 will be demonstrating its new solutions at booth #6034 at the 2010 ISC West conference in Las Vegas, March 24-26, 2010. The MiniBank and HardBank will be the company’s first products offered through distribution.

VMware has announced the availability of VMware’s ThinApp 4.5 application virtualization solution.

ThinApp 4.5 enables rapid adoption of Microsoft Windows 7 in the enterprise by providing compatibility for legacy and custom applications across multiple Windows operating system environments. With ThinApp 4.5, enterprises can quickly migrate existing applications to new Windows operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 7, eliminating conflicts between operating environments, and extending the life of application investments.

VMware data shows that leveraging ThinApp 4.5 for application virtualization can reduce the costs associated with migration by as much as 25% while migrating systems up to 40% faster by accelerating the application compatibility, testing and deployment processes required for application migration.

VMware ThinApp 4.5 new advanced enterprise features include:

• Simplified application migration to Windows 7 — Eliminates costly recoding, reduces regression testing to accelerate application deployment to a new OS while minimizing risks of downtime.
• Broad Windows 64-bit support — supports 32-bit and 64-bit Windows from NT to Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.
• Easy Upgrade from older ThinApp Applications with Relink — convert existing ThinApps to the new ThinApp 4.5 format without the need of associated project files for the applications.
• Advanced Performance Accelerator — reduced page file usage for virtual applications allows for quicker application invocation and reduces network bandwidth by as much as 50%.
• Secure Registry Journaling Protection — ensure registry file integrity and eliminate potential data corruption due to crash or system failure.
• Enhanced Community Support — enables sharing of application packaging status and techniques in the ThinApp Community Portal.

VMware ThinApp Application virtualization software isolates applications from the operating environment, increasing compatibility and manageability across multiple operating systems common in the enterprise. By enabling enterprises to manage and deliver applications from a central source, VMware ThinApp streamlines application security, updates, patches and performance while delivering applications instantly to nearly any device.

The result is significantly reduced application management costs of up to 60%. Increased compatibility across operating systems ensures investment protection for legacy and custom applications even as the underlying operating system changes. Enterprises considering upgrading to Windows 7 can avoid the costly process of recoding, retesting and recertifying existing applications on the new operating systems through application virtualization on VMware ThinApp.

VMware ThinApp 4.5 will be generally available on March 17, 2010, through VMware sales and the company’s extensive network of OEM partners and channel partners. Pricing for VMware ThinApp Suite is $5000.00. VMware ThinApp is also bundled in View Premier for $250 per concurrent user.

Virtustream, a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced xStream, the first truly hybrid enterprise cloud platform that delivers cost and resource savings through flexible internal (private) and external (off-premise) cloud environments.

xStream is available as a dedicated or multi-tenant platform, managed or unmanaged, on and off premise, and it has the flexibility and elasticity built-in to accommodate a wide range of enterprise IT environments at any stage of virtualization adoption.

xStream increases operational efficiency and ROI and offers greater financial flexibility through its consumption-based pricing. Clients purchase the amount of infrastructure resources they need as multi-tiered workload infrastructure units with integrated High Availability and Disaster Recovery. The hybrid cloud environments are managed through a single, centralized subscription-based deployment, and offer end-to-end service-level agreements for those deployments. xStream’s self service personalized portal provides role-based access for administering, monitoring, controlling and reporting on the virtual private data center solution.

xStream’s patent-pending “on-boarding” process leverages deep expertise in virtualization and cloud computing with proprietary data collection and analysis tools that profile the application workloads and translate them into cloud-based resource requirements to deliver an optimized and tailored resource model. In this way, Virtustream’s cloud solutions are able to deliver a minimized total cost of ownership and a short-term return on investment based on decisions made at the onset of a project.

xStream is based on Virtustream’s track record of nearly a decade of providing virtualization solutions, and it serves as the foundation for additional offerings including professional services and managed services.

Virtustream’s xStream platform offers a number of additional differentiating features that deliver benefits and efficiencies to enterprise IT, including:

– Better resource utilization due to aggregate workload focus
– transformation and on-boarding toolkit
– Vendor agnostic approach to leverage best of breed hardware and software

xStream is available immediately and is priced on a subscription basis by contacting Virtustream.

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.