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INX’s Architecture Certified Engineer program (A.C.E.) has been developed to create a top tier certification around virtualized data center architecture for existing INX senior engineering staff through training, labs and hands on development. By using existing certifications from Cisco Systems, NetApp, and VMware along with a unique set of INX additional requirements, INX’s A.C.E. certification program creates a strong foundation for architecting virtualized data center and cloud computing architectures for enterprises.

Jonathan Groves, Vice President of Services for INX:

“Most of our key technology manufacturer partners, such as Cisco Systems, VMware and NetApp, have their own set of engineering certifications related to their respective point solutions, but customers need architecture approaches to solving their technology infrastructure requirements. INX has created this new program to ensure that our engineers have the additional training and experience to architect comprehensive solutions that include multiple vendors in a virtualized data center or cloud computing environment. There is no industry accepted multi-vendor high-level certification for virtualized data center or cloud computing architectures in the market today so we created our own.” Groves added, “The A.C.E. program is the most challenging multi-vendor certification program I have seen and exceeds any single vendor’s program requirements in our industry.” The A.C.E. certification for the Data Center Architect includes certifications from Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCDX) and NetApp (NCIE), as well as additional INX written and field experience requirements.

INX will develop additional A.C.E. certifications for other advanced technology infrastructure architectures.

A.C.E. program requirements for Unified Communications and Collaboration architectures will be released in November of 2009.

Veeam Software says it has achieved a major breakthrough in full and incremental backup speeds with version 4.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication.

The new capabilities are due in part to the product’s ability to leverage advanced functionality in VMware vSphere 4, especially the new changed block tracking and thin-provisioned disks features.

Now generally available, version 4.0 is one of the first products to support the new VMware vSphere 4 vStorage APIs for Data Protection. Veeam Backup & Replication takes full advantage of VMware vSphere 4 thin-provisioned disks, enabling faster full backups and restores of virtual machines. It also gives VMware administrators the ability to leverage VMware vSphere 4 changed block tracking for performance improvements that beta customers report as more than ten times faster than the previous version of Veeam Backup & Replication.

These technological advancements within VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection take data protection to the next level in Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0. Beta customers reported the following benefits derived from native support of thin-provisioned disks and changed block tracking:

• Incremental backup and replication is 10 or more times faster (for typical VMs and workloads)
• Full backup and replication is up to five times faster
• Changed block tracking allows for replication cycles as fast as one to three minutes, resulting in near continuous data protection (CDP) at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDP, making it affordable to customers of all sizes
• Primary and backup storage costs decreased by nearly 30 percent

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 also introduces the concept of “centralized backup, decentralized recovery” with its Enterprise Manager. This allows companies to scale the backup infrastructure in distributed enterprise environments by deploying multiple backup servers. Enterprise Manager centralizes the backup process, which includes centralized backup configuration as well as reporting and alerting. It also provides decentralization and delegation of recovery based on groups of applications (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Servers), geography, administrative, security and other business specifications.

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 is now generally available. North American pricing for the new version starts at $599 per socket, but the previous version’s price of $499 per socket will be honored on orders placed by Dec. 31, 2009.

Unity Technologies, the San Francisco company behind the multi-platform game development platform for PC, Mac, Wii and Web games, has closed its first round of funding.

The Series A financing was led by Sequoia Capital and also included some Silicon Valley notables like David Gardner, the CEO of Atari, and Diane Greene, founder and former CEO of VMware.

The co-founder and former CEO of VMware will also be joining the startup’s board of directors along with Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia.

(Via TechCrunch)

VMware today announced the availability of VMware Workstation 7.

With Windows 7 support, enhanced 3D graphics, and many new and refined features, VMware Workstation 7 continues to transform the way technical professionals develop, test, demo and deploy software. The improvements help developers, QA engineers, sales professionals and IT administrators reduce hardware costs and streamline tasks, saving time and improving productivity.

VMware Workstation 7 is the most powerful, reliable and secure desktop virtualization product with the most comprehensive feature set. Enhancements include:

• Best in Class Windows 7 Support. VMware Workstation 7 is optimized for maximum performance when running on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 PCs and works seamlessly with Flip 3D and Aero Peek to show live virtual machine activity.
• The Best 3D Graphics. Run even more 3D applications with support for Windows Aero, DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1 in Windows virtual machines.
• Features Designed for Professionals. VMware Workstation 7 streamlines software development and testing with new IDE integrations for the SpringSource Tools Suite and Eclipse IDE for Java & C/C++ along with Record Replay Debugging improvements that make it faster to find non-deterministic bugs.
• Most Advanced Virtualization Capabilities. Run 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems with up to four virtual CPUs and 32GB of RAM dedicated to each virtual machine.

VMware Workstation 7 is now available for download for $189.00. Upgrades from prior versions of VMware Workstation are available for $99.00. VMware Workstation can also be purchased through VMware’s network of resellers and distributors.

VMware today announced that VMware Fusion 3 is now available.

With more than 50 new features, VMware Fusion 3 makes it easier than ever to run Windows applications with Mac simplicity.

With the new built-in Migration Assistant for Windows, VMware Fusion 3 is more than two times faster than other “Switch to Mac” solutions. Users can move their entire PCs — including applications, files documents, and settings — to their Macs with a simple Ethernet cable, a FireWire cable, or even wirelessly.

VMware Fusion 3 includes more than 50 new features and enhancements, delivering a better-than-ever Windows on Mac experience. Key highlights include:

• Performance, Finely Tuned. Support for 4-way SMP to maximize performance on the latest iMac and Mac Pro. Lower overhead and up to 2X faster resume time for a suspended virtual machine.
• More Mac-Like Than Ever. Banish the start menu and launch Windows apps from the new “always-on” applications menu, even when VMware Fusion isn’t running. VMware Fusion provides convenient new ways to experience Windows applications like Mac applications.
• Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
• Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 will be the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
• Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 will enable users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications — all without rebooting.

The release of VMware Fusion 3 has been widely anticipated. With more than 10,000 private beta users who have helped shape the features in the product, the VMware Fusion community is eager to upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.

VMware Fusion 3 is now available at the VMware online store and at authorized United States retailers for a suggested retail price of $79.99 and will be available at authorized worldwide retail locations beginning November 4. Upgrades from previous versions of VMware Fusion to VMware Fusion 3 are now available for $39.99 right here.

CA today announced 12 new and updated Enterprise IT Management products that will help enterprises and service providers gain increased business value from virtualized environments. CA’s solutions allow organizations to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from virtualized computing environments through comprehensive capabilities for IT management, governance, automation and security.

Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualization, with 31 percent of operating system instances virtualized in 2008 and growing to 54 percent in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision makers in North America and Europe, conducted Forrester Research. By simplifying and automating the management of virtualized and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualization more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology for virtualization, including solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.

New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:

• CA Spectrum Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualization of infrastructure in the context of IT services; a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.
• CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralized application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualization deployments and enable quicker server recovery. It will also features extended support across VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, IBM LPAR, Sun Solaris and other platforms for centralized management of heterogeneous environments—helping to improve cost efficiency, agility, service quality, and mitigating IT and business risk.
• CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA’s virtualization management capabilities.
• CA Insight Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows; Oracle; SQL Server and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments—even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion—without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for “at-a-glance” problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.

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