News

Launched today by Flexiant, the software and services company, Extility is a licensed virtualised cloud platform delivering all of the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API.

Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days. Licensees of Extility will not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they will be able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years (Source: Gartner).

Extility’s licensees will see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them more effectively to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. Reduced energy consumption will slash operating costs and significantly shrink carbon footprint – a central consideration in an increasingly environmentally conscious business ecosystem. Importantly, in these times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods will be shortened dramatically through accelerated delivery timescales, in turn reducing time to invoice and to attain positive, profitable cash flow. Extility will significantly enhance licensee profiles and product offerings through seamless branding and bringing real commercial gains to their customers.

FlexiScale 2.0 brings new opportunity to the Cloud Virtualisation reseller market and exciting new functionality to end users: Leading edge differentiation and value creation

FlexiScale 2.0, is a complete rebuild of Europe’s first cloud platform using Flexiant’s revolutionary Extility technology. FlexiScale 2.0 not only allows end-users to benefit from a wholly scalable hosting infrastructure but also reaches out to the wider world of IT services delivery companies with the opportunity to extend their offering to existing customers, whilst differentiating their services in a progressively demanding market place where most IT services have been, or are seen to have been, commoditised.

Flexiant’s Resellers and Affiliates will be able to rapidly leverage their existing customer base to take advantage of FlexiScale’s platform independent infrastructure, bringing immediate improvement to bottom-line performance, whilst delivering highly dependable world class services to their customers.

Currently in its final Beta testing cycle, FlexiScale 2.0 will launch on 23rd March 2010. Additional information will be released closer to the launch date indicating how and where you can participate in this exciting opportunity. In the interim, Flexiant’s channel development team is seeking to sign up early adopter resellers across a range of sectors.

VMware today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the purchase of up to $400 million of its Class A common stock through the end of 2011.

Stock will be purchased from time to time, in the open market or through private transactions, subject to market conditions.

The Company expects the equity purchase program to help partially offset dilution from its equity programs and believes it to be an appropriate use of proceeds from the exercise of employee stock options.

Fujifilm has announced its largest virtualization implementation to date.

Clarian Health has replaced its legacy PACS with a fully virtualized Synapse system and a complete disaster recovery/ business continuance system.  Since completing the rollout of this comprehensive initiative, Clarian has reduced its overall costs while also documenting increased efficiencies across the health system that are enabling improved patient care.

The initial Clarian Heath Partners PACS project included 5 hospitals and 9 outpatient imaging centers in the Indianapolismetropolitan area. Fujifilm replaced more than 80 legacy servers with just six virtualized servers to run Synapse PACS for all of these facilities.  Currently about 700,000 yearly exams are being hosted with capacity for up to one million exams that will require no additional investment or modification since it is a fully scalable solution.  By significantly reducing the amount of physical servers that need to be procured and maintained, Clarian is benefiting from notable cost savings as well as “green” advantages like reduced power and cooling requirements that are critical to Clarian’s long-term goals.  All of Clarian’s hospitals have also noted the proven ability of the virtualized Synapse system to significantly reduce report turnaround times anywhere from one to five hours.

In addition to rolling out the Synapse system in a virtualized environment, Fujifilm also implemented a complete disaster recovery/business continuance plan for Clarian, something the facility did not previously have.  The entire Synapse system can be failed over to another datacenter in less than an hour, enabling the health system to provide uninterrupted care.

Citrix today announced immediate availability of five new Citrix® NetScaler Application Firewall appliances designed to bring a new level of security to public and private clouds and web applications.

Each of the new appliances is built on the Citrix NetScaler MPX hardware platform, the application acceleration, load balancing and web-security system that powers thousands of enterprise datacenters and most of the world’s largest clouds and websites. With the introduction of this new offering, Citrix now provides solutions ranging from the 10 Mbps Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliance to a record breaking 5 Gbps with the NetScaler MPX hardware appliance – meeting the needs of small and large enterprises, managed security services providers (MSSPs) and cloud providers. In fact, the new appliances outperform throughput levels from the nearest competitor by two times across multiple performance metrics.

In addition to detecting and blocking application threats targeting traditional web applications, NetScaler Application Firewall incorporates advanced protections for Web 2.0 applications and services. The proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies among application developers is driving the need for more sophisticated security protections and greater native fluency of XML-based applications. NetScaler Application Firewall performs comprehensive HTML and XML security checks including:

• XML denial of service (XDoS) to protect servers from malicious XML payloads by enforcing limits on the payload structure
• Schema validation and format checks to verify proper data types on SOAP messages and XML payloads
• SQL injection and cross site scripting
• Attachment checks to block attachments with malicious executables or viruses
• WS-I basic profile compliance

The NetScaler Application Firewall is a comprehensive and powerful security solution that blocks known and unknown attacks against web and web services applications. It utilizes a positive security model allowing only correct application behavior, without requiring constant updates of attack signatures. The NetScaler Application Firewall is ICSA certified and provides protection against a wide array of malicious attack techniques targeting application vulnerabilities, confidential data theft, denial of service, and web site defacement. It is available on NetScaler MPX hardware appliances. NetScaler Application Firewall is also included with the NetScaler VPX software appliance, further enhancing the company’s ability to offer cloud and web security as part of the industry’s only end-to-end networking virtualization solution.

NetScaler Application Firewall is now available on MPX 5500, MPX 7500, MPX 9500, MPX 10500 and MPX 12500 appliances through Citrix Solution Advisors worldwide. Pricing begins at $20,000. Pay-as-You-Grow licensing is available for MPX 7500, MPX 9500 and MPX 10500 appliances.

nCircle today announced the release of new audience-specific security risk and compliance dashboards and enhanced auditing of virtual IT infrastructures.

The new dashboards are part of nCircle’s self-service security and compliance portal and provide role-based visibility into an organization’s IT governance, risk and compliance (IT GRC) processes. nCircle also delivers security and compliance auditing of VMWare-based virtual infrastructures, a key area of investment in today’s enterprises.

Suite360 now delivers the industry’s most advanced security risk and compliance analytics.

User-programmable dashboards deliver the right information to the right audience:

· Risk and compliance trends for executives

· Current compliance posture vs. target, with detailed drill down for auditors

· Instant visibility to security issues across the enterprise for IT security

· Prioritized remediation instructions with role-based asset views for IT operations

For the first time, enterprises can visit a central portal to get the actionable security and compliance information that matters to them. Asset views enable analysis of security and compliance audit data by any business dimension, including asset type, asset owner, geography or business unit. Annotation capabilities enable administrators to explain deviations directly in the reports for improved understanding by multiple audiences. Suite360 enables all IT audiences to view the security and compliance status of their networks and clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts and investments.

The use of virtualized infrastructure in the enterprise has grown rapidly in recent years and is now a critical tool for enterprises, enabling server consolidation, more efficient data center management and other cost reductions. However, the spread of virtualization has created new security and compliance issues, requiring continuous auditing of the virtual infrastructure to maintain security and compliance.

nCircle Suite360 now audits the full virtual infrastructure, from virtual machines to the hypervisor, on VMWare-based systems. Suite360 audits the configurations of an organization’s virtual infrastructure and compares them to Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks, or hardening guides, to ensure the security of virtual machines and their hypervisor. The CIS benchmarks are accepted best practices for secure operation of VMware virtual machines and hypervisors. Additionally, Suite360 can continuously monitor hypervisors and virtual machines to ensure configurations remain compliant with the “gold standard” build, making the administration of these systems considerably easier and more efficient.