News

Avaya announced today the launch of an Avaya Aura midsize solution, the first single-server unified communications solution suited for businesses as small as 100 employee users and as large as 2,400 users and 250 locations.

Avaya also announced that virtualization – the use of software to allow a single piece of hardware to run multiple applications at the same time – will be the de facto method for deploying its applications going forward.

Available in November, the Avaya Aura midsize solution takes advantage of the new Avaya Aura System Platform, a real-time virtualization technology enabling unmodified versions of Avaya Communication Manager, Voice Messaging, SIP Enablement Services, Application Enablement Services, Utility Services and Media Services to be deployed on a single server. Optional backup is available for server redundancy.

As a result, enterprises can reduce hardware, power and cooling, and maintenance requirements by up to 75 percent, the company said in a press statement.

The solution also facilitates simplified installation and ongoing management with integrated services for administrators, wizards and self-use administration tools. Avaya said the solution can be remotely deployed in less than two hours.

Customers can also add Avaya Contact Center Express (CCE), a multichannel contact center solution for midsize enterprises, to deliver customer service capabilities using an array of features including a unified desktop display, advanced multimedia tools and integration to CRM software, including Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The CCE common administration tool will soon be enhanced to let companies manage the contact center-related data and capabilities of Avaya Aura Communication Manager from within CCE.

The Avaya Aura midsize solution for enterprises comes in both Standard and Enterprise Editions. Enterprise Edition includes the Avaya Unified Communications All Inclusive end-user package; companies using Standard Edition can purchase the package for $60 per user. Avaya Unified Communications All Inclusive is a single license that provides easy access to corporate communications from simple, consistent interfaces whether an employee is mobile, at home or remote offices, a hotel or at work.

DataCore Software, a provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, this week unveiled New Business Continuity Starter SAN packages and promotions, new capabilities such as Advanced Site Recovery (ASR), a simple, pre-configured Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA), Citrix Essentials StorageLink adapter for Hyper-V and XenServer and support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The DataCore presence at the show for the first year consolidates the recent announcements and inroads that DataCore has made into optimizing storage virtualization:

• “DataCore Announces New Advanced Site Recovery Solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft”

• “DataCore Software Now Supports Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)”

• DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and Citrix Essentials StorageLink Adapter for Microsoft Hyper-V
• “DataCore Software and VMware vSphere™ are VMware Ready Certified”

DataCore has packaged several promotions that are now available to virtualization solution advisors and resellers. These promotions will enable partners to reap the rewards and benefits of having DataCore storage virtualization solutions in their arsenal of product offerings. They include:

• Academic programs offering 50% educational discounts
• A “Revitalize or Repurpose” existing storage arrays or SANs promotion
• A 1TB Starter SAN Software Promotion for Business Continuity & DR
• Special government programs and discounts

The new Solution Advisor Resource Centre provides essential sales training and positioning to help resellers and solution advisors grow their virtualization business with DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions.

Select materials of the new Solution Advisor Resource Center include:

• An eight-minute “Get Acquainted with DataCore” introduction.
• Video Sales Training Presentations
• An Overview of Bundles, Promotions & Packaging
• VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V Sales reference cards, including “Tips for selling DataCore solutions to Server & Desktop Virtualization clients”. And much, much more.

DataCore makes it easy for any virtualization reseller to sell DataCore storage virtualization solutions. The new resources are on the DataCore web site – and unlike traditional portals all the info in the “Quick Start” site is available for use without having to fill out applications. Therefore, partners can immediately review what they need to know to sell. All they have to do to resell is contact an existing authorized distributor. DataCore’s UK distributors are:

• Bell Micro; DNS Arrow; Magirus.

Centrix Software has announced the availability of its free Centrix WorkSpace ROI calculator.

The online calculator is designed to help businesses investing in virtualization assess where further server, application and energy cost savings can be achieved. It shows how increasing server density and rationalising application installs can improve the ROI of virtualization infrastructures by up to 40%.

The Centrix WorkSpace ROI calculator is the first tool to give an assessment based on application metering in a virtual environment. It calculates the server and application cost and CO2 savings that enterprises could achieve by deploying Centrix WorkSpace, a virtual access platform that enables companies to optimise virtualized environments, meter the delivery of applications on a per-user basis and apply charge-back metrics to application delivery. With Centrix WorkSpace, organisations can monitor and control how applications and services are being taken up across the business, and prove that their IT investments are generating real business value.

Centrix Software provides support to organisations at all stages of their virtualization lifecycles. With Centrix WorkSpace organisations can accelerate and improve the user benefits of server and desktop virtualization projects and provide on-going business intelligence on IT consumption by user, business unit, department or company group. It enables organisations to:

• Automate the discovery and metering of applications
o IT can understand what applications are running enterprise-wide, how they are delivered, who is accessing them, how frequently and for how long
o The deployment of applications can be determined based on cost efficiency and user requirements
• Optimise infrastructure and application investments whilst improving user experience
o IT has a single launch pad for applications across any platform, virtual or physical
o Application presentation is decoupled from application delivery to improve the user experience and flexibility of corporate IT services
• Provide ongoing business intelligence on how to best deliver IT services
o Organisations gain visibility on the most/least cost efficient applications and platforms
o Business and IT decision-makers can understand the cost of IT services and align service delivery with actual business usage
o IT can define sourcing and application strategies based on business return

NetScout Systems has announced the availability of the nGenius Virtual Agent software, extending critical unified service delivery visibility into applications contained within a virtual computing environment.

As a virtualized implementation of the company’s widely deployed nGenius Probe technology, the nGenius Virtual Agent extends high-performance packet-flow monitoring and analysis capabilities deeper into the data center and private clouds — enabling the IT organization to regain true end-to-end visibility of application traffic from within virtual servers.

As IT organizations are increasingly leveraging application and server virtualization technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs and ease the environmental impact of compute resources, they lose vital visibility into the behavior and performance of the very applications that have been virtualized. What was once a rack of dedicated servers interconnected via network switches has now been consolidated into a single virtual server hosting many different applications with a virtual switch enabling communications between the virtual machines. While tools exist for managing the virtual platform, IT organizations have remained challenged to consistently manage, optimize and troubleshoot virtualized applications relative to, and in context with, end-to-end service delivery. IT staff needs a unified view into inter-application transactions and performance as it relates to end-to-end service levels and user experience that is consistent with how traditional application deployments have been measured.

Seamlessly integrated with the nGenius Service Assurance Solution, the nGenius Virtual Agent complements nGenius hardware-based instrumentation strategies by reestablishing real-time, always-on visibility into virtual computing environments. The nGenius Virtual Agent installs as a virtual appliance on a virtual machine, consuming minimal platform resources. In the case of a VMware® environment, the Virtual Agent connects to the hypervisor’s virtual switch to reveal visibility for all application transactions within or across virtual servers. The Agent software automatically discovers all applications and their interdependencies within, and external to, the virtual server providing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), intelligent anomaly detection and comprehensive performance metrics.

Consistent with dedicated Probe technology, the Virtual Agent supports short-term packet capture capabilities that can be initiated on-demand or in response to a pre-defined trigger. For deployments that require always-on intelligent Deep Packet Capture (iDPC) capabilities from within the virtual environment, the nGenius Virtual Agent can also be deployed in a continuous “TAP mode” that enables the mirroring of all virtual server traffic to an external nGenius InfiniStream appliance. This enables invaluable back-in-time forensic analysis of application and inter/intra virtual machine traffic providing even more granular historical insight into application behavior from within the virtual server. The dual mode operation of the Virtual Agent provides unmatched deployment versatility while enabling the IT organization to regain valuable forensics analysis capabilities that can only be performed with actual application packets.

With rich application performance metadata from virtual servers, the nGenius Service Assurance Solution analyzes and reports on virtualized application transactions in the identical manner and context as for non-virtualized server transactions. This provides the IT organization with granular understanding of how application interdependencies may impact overall application performance and the downstream effect on user experience. In addition, IT staff benefits from a unified view of the virtual application traffic over the end-to-end service delivery environment that also includes voice, video, telepresence, and other non-virtualized applications. This dramatically simplifies the management of complex virtual application deployments and enables the IT organization to more efficiently optimize service delivery, predict and prevent performance issues and speed problem resolution in context with the overall service delivery environment. Cross-organization collaboration is also enhanced since the nGenius Service Assurance Solution provides unified visibility that can be leveraged across the IT organization including the network, application, server and data center teams to achieve operational consistency.

Adding to the performance management challenges associated with virtualization is the advent of dynamic application movement across virtual environments. In a virtualized deployment, applications can move from one virtual server to another, increasing the network management team’s challenge of anticipating and managing network traffic. Since virtual servers can be located in different parts of the data center or around the world, an application’s movement can cause significant and unexpected impact to network operations — resulting in performance degradations and undesired user impact. While the application or server team may know about the application’s movement, the network staff can be caught by surprise from moving application-bound traffic. With the Virtual Agent deployed, the nGenius Service Assurance Solution will identify application movement between servers from a network perspective. The Virtual Agent automatically discovers new or moved applications within a virtual server enabling network staff to instantaneously know which applications have moved, enabling them to predict and address sudden changes in network traffic patterns. This knowledge will also help IT staff to correlate and better understand the performance of virtualized services across multiple servers and network elements, validate the implementation of moved services and aid in the optimization of application use of compute and network resources.

The initial implementation of the nGenius Virtual Agent software is available now for VMware ESX and VMware ESXi environments and can be seamlessly inserted into existing nGenius managed environments. The iDPC TAP functionality will be supported in Q4 2009 through a minor software update available at no cost. NetScout distributes the Virtual Agent Software freely, but its deployment consumes a license port within the nGenius Performance Manager platform resulting in an effective cost of $1,000 per deployed agent.

Citrix today announced a new 2-for-1 trade-up offer that makes it easy for Citrix XenApp customers to realize all the benefits of desktop virtualization by stepping up to the new XenDesktop 4.

The “Trade-up to XenDesktop 4” program allows XenApp customers to trade up their existing XenApp concurrent user licenses for twice the number of XenDesktop 4 user licenses – a savings of up to 80 percent off list price. With its new FlexCast™ delivery technology, XenDesktop 4 is the first product in the industry to deliver every major type of virtual desktop in a single, integrated solution. XenDesktop 4 further extends the value of desktop virtualization by including all the functionality of XenApp as a core integrated feature, making it easy for customers to deliver on-demand applications as a seamless part of their overall desktop management strategy. By taking advantage of this limited-time trade-up offer, XenApp customers can make virtual desktops a reality for all of their employees at a fraction of the cost.

XenApp customers have already taken an important first step towards centralized desktop management, delivering an estimated 25 million applications to more than 100 million users every day¹. Many of these same customers are now looking to extend the benefits of centralization to all desktops in the enterprise. The new Trade-up to XenDesktop 4 program gives these customers the best of both worlds, allowing them to leverage all the functionality they already own, while adding a simple, low-risk path to full desktop virtualization when they are ready. For many enterprise customers, the upcoming Windows 7 desktop refresh provides the perfect opportunity to choose from a variety of virtual desktop models to simplify desktop management enterprise wide.

For more than 100 million users worldwide, XenApp has consistently proven that it delivers superior performance, security and TCO across a wide variety of use cases, cutting application management costs in half for most customers. With XenApp now included as a core integrated feature of XenDesktop, most customers going forward will find XenDesktop 4 to be the best solution to meet their combined desktop and app virtualization needs.

For customers focused on delivering Windows applications with no plans to step up to desktop virtualization in the near future, the standalone XenApp product line will continue to be the best solution to meet their needs. Because XenApp is sold on a concurrent user basis, it also remains the most cost-effective solution for use cases with high application concurrency ratios. Cloud providers delivering Windows apps as an on-demand service will also find XenApp to be the best solution, as will independent software vendors offering XenApp as a part of their enterprise application platforms.

To take advantage of the full 2-for-1 trade-up offer, customers active on Subscription Advantage must trade up all their existing XenApp licenses. Suggested list pricing for the trade-up begins at $45 per user, plus the normal cost of subscription renewal – a savings of up to 80 percent off the list price of XenDesktop 4.

Additional trade-up offers are available for customers who only wish to exchange a portion of their existing XenApp licenses.