News

Pano Logic today announced Pano System 2.8, and Pano Dual Monitor, further enhancing the end user experience, increasing scalability and simplifying IT management.

Pano System 2.8 improves the efficiency and convenience of managing deployments while doubling the number of desktops that can be controlled from a single management console. The Pano Dual Monitor is a USB adaptor that allows applications to operate as though two display devices were directly attached. Windows and applications automatically maximise to the physical dimensions of the display without additional software required.  The new release will be the first version of Pano Logic offered by the most recent channel partner for the UK region, STL Technologies, which has delivered valued IT infrastructure solutions to public and commercial sectors for over 40 years.

Unlike thin-clients that bulk up with processors in the endpoint, and add management burden, the Pano System provides end users with a full and dynamic PC experience without compromising simplicity by adding an endpoint processor.  Today’s announcement emphasises Pano Logic’s dedication to redefining the delivery and management of end user computing with innovative technology that radically centralises virtual desktop management.

The Pano System is an all-in-one desktop virtualisation solution.  The system includes Pano Device, a zero client endpoint, and Pano Manager, a unified management interface.  The Pano System unlike any other desktop VDI solution radically centralises 100% computing power to the virtualised server.

There is no processor, no operating system, no memory, no drivers, no software and no moving parts in the Pano Device, resulting in absolutely zero endpoint management.  The lifespan of a Pano zero client device is over 3 times that of a thin client or PC.  The Pano Device retains no data and is secure against any data-loss.  Each zero client Pano Device uses less than 3 watts of power, just 3 percent of what energy efficient PCs use, translating into significant energy savings. The Pano Device connects over an existing IP network to an instance of Microsoft Windows virtualised on a datacenter server.

Pano Manager is a very simple to use web-based management interface that enables administrators to manage the entire virtual desktop deployment.  The Pano Manager interacts with a lightweight service (Pano Direct) residing within each desktop virtual machine that links peripherals attached to the Pano Device to the unmodified Windows drivers residing in the virtual machine. This design guarantees that all existing Windows drivers will work without modification.

VMware today announced the opening of a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington. Throughout its design and build-out, VMware chose industry best practices to create an energy-efficient facility that utilizes cutting-edge technology and maximizes the use of VMware virtualization software. As a result, VMware expects to achieve $5 million in savings per year from the facility.

VMware has significantly reduced its environmental footprint and expects to attain rapid Return on Investment (ROI) on its next-generation datacenter investment through:

• $4 million each year in energy and $1 million each year in location consolidation costs for a total of $5 million in savings per year
• Deployment of virtualization with 100 percent clean, renewable energy
• 70 percent savings in power and equipment, due to air-side economization, the practice of using free outside air to cool the facility
• A targeted Power Utilization Rate (PUE) of between 1.2 – 1.5 — well below the industry standard of 2 – 2.4

Pending application for LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council. LEED is the internationally recognized green building certification system.

The VMware facility employed industry-leading solutions designed to enable datacenters to run more efficiently, including:

• Hydroelectric power to deliver cost savings without carbon emissions
• Hydroelectric power, which is green and more sustainable than other energy resources, is the sole source of power for VMware’s datacenter, which is expected to save the company approximately 50 percent in power rates alone.

Airside economizers allow VMware to use the state of Washington’s cold outside air to cool its datacenter facility nearly year-round. By leveraging outside air, VMware is able to significantly lower its use of commercial grade air conditioning and create a power cost offset. As a result, the company expects to reduce its air conditioning utilization by 50-75 percent over time. In addition, the free, outside air allows VMware to use less power to cool its computer equipment, resulting in an additional 20-30 percent gain in energy savings.

To reduce on-going operating costs, VMware chose to adopt containment methodology to make its datacenter more efficient. Rather than operate a mixed air environment, VMware elected to isolate the cool air from the hot, and use rooftop air conditioning units — where the hot air is returned and the heat then siphoned off to warm the office area — to reuse typically wasted, server-generated heat. This hot aisle containment strategy greatly improves the efficiency of VMware’s air handling equipment, further driving down power requirements. By eliminating the need for a compressor in favor of a fan on most days, the company also avoids wasting hydroelectric power. VMware estimates the cost savings for this system to be approximately $500,000 per year.

Like many of its customers, VMware has deployed its industry leading virtualization platform, VMware vSphere 4, because it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting while also reducing equipment, power, cooling and real estate costs.

As a result, VMware operates its datacenter more cost effectively, and provides less business interruption because of fewer outages, less downtime and fewer maintenance issues.

VMware customers can reduce their energy costs and consumption by up to 80 percent through virtualization. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 5-15 percent of the time they are powered on, yet most industry-standard hardware consumes 60-90 percent of the normal workload power even when idle. VMware virtualization has advanced resource and memory management features that enable consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85 percent. Once virtualized, VMware’s Distributed Power Management (DPM) monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. With VMware virtualization, customers can dramatically reduce energy consumption without sacrificing reliability or service levels.

The new datacenter will support VMware’s internal IT department, as well as become a testing ground for VMware’s R&D group to rapidly develop and deliver new products to market.

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced that its newest version of Veeam Monitor and Veeam Monitor Free Edition has redefined VMware performance monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and troubleshooting.

Now both versions support Veeam Business View, which means IT professionals can monitor their VMware environments based on business criteria. This helps them identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows them to create flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and impact to business.

Veeam Monitor has become the industry standard for VMware monitoring. It is integrated with VMware vCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of an organization’s virtual machines. Not only does it support and extend VMware’s management framework, which offloads the monitoring burden from vCenter and results in enhanced performance, but it also can support multiple vCenters and display performance data from the entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen—no matter how large the VMware deployment.

While VMware vCenter does provide a view of the VMware infrastructure, it’s an administrative/technical view, which shows virtual machines grouped by datacenters, clusters, or ESX and ESXi hosts. IT professionals can use VM folders to manually group VMs based on business criteria, but maintaining these folders requires daily error-prone manual procedures, and they are limited to only one categorization dimension.

In addition to its integration with Veeam Monitor, Veeam Business View is also integrated with Veeam Reporter Enterprise, the Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware and the nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware.

Veeam Monitor 4.5 is available immediately, with North American pricing beginning at $250 USD per socket. The upgrade is available at no charge to Veeam Monitor customers currently on maintenance.

Evans Data Corp today announced that Google is the company that developers think of as having the best ability to execute in a public cloud setting while IBM is strongest for the private cloud, according to a recent survey of over 400 software developers published this week in an Evans Data Market Alert.

The survey, conducted in September, measured developers’ perceptions of leading vendors in the cloud space including Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T, Rackspace, VMware, Sun, and HP, among others. Adoption, adoption intentions, completeness of offering, and ability to execute were rated by the developers along with capabilities such as security, scalability, low latency, reliability, no vendor lock-in, and cost to value ratio. In addition, developers positioned the vendors as better suited to either public or private cloud offerings.

The survey report, which is free with registration, can be found here.

Amazon was seen as having the most complete solution today, but Google was thought to have more ability to execute, and Google topped Amazon in most other categories. Additionally, adoption intentions in the next 12 months were much stronger for Google than for Amazon. IBM was thought to be able to provide the most secure cloud environment and was also rated high in reliability and ability to execute – qualities essential to large enterprises considering private or hybrid clouds.

NetApp today announced that it will provide the storage infrastructure to support BT’s new Virtual Data Centre (VDC).

BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, is offering a multi-tenanted service aimed at mid-sized and larger businesses that are looking to move all or part of their IT resources onto a pay for use platform. BT already hosts data and applications for a wide range of UK businesses. VDC aims to move customers from tailored hosting arrangements to a service where organisations can buy the exact capacity they require. BT has added the ability to configure an entire data centre from a single console with the ability to provision servers, storage and network resources with built-in resilience and business continuity.

A blade service architecture, combined with NetApp storage systems and virtualisation software, allows BT customers to have their infrastructure and Windows-based applications up and running on the VDC in just five days. Once the system is up, existing VDC customers will be able to deploy a virtual server in as little as 15 minutes.

Because the NetApp storage infrastructure takes care of so much of the basic storage management, from snap-shotting and off-site replication to de-duplication, the storage infrastructure is largely self managing, needing little in the way of day-to-day support. The core storage infrastructure for VDC is based around NetApp FAS6080c clusters.

BT chose NetApp hardware due the strong partnership the two companies have had for several years. BT already uses NetApp equipment extensively in its existing data centres.

The partnership with NetApp allows BT to provide the storage element of VDC in a highly cost effective way, which also provides the day-to-day storage management resources needed as part of the package. This will allow BT’s engineers to focus their time and energy on revenue generating activities.

NetApp will provide FAS6080c clusters with iSCSI connectivity utilising Fibre Channel and SATA drives. A NetApp, software suite, including ONTAP 7.3, SnapMirror, Multistore, iSCSI, Snaprestore, Snap Vault and Protection Manager has been integrated with BT’s own software technology to create a management portal BT’s customers can use to design, configure and upgrade the system. The initial infrastructure is based around iSCSI and SATA drives, although Fibre Channel could be introduced to support higher performing applications.

IGEL Technology today launched its Universal Desktop Converter, which allows customers to convert old PCs, thin clients and select third-party hardware to a remotely managed IGEL Universal Desktop. By installing the company’s Universal Firmware, customers will experience a smooth transition to a server-based computing or desktop virtualization environment without the expense of replacing the entire client hardware. This enables companies of all sizes to extend the lifecycle of their existing infrastructure, reduce the cost of investing in new hardware and eliminate client maintenance costs.

IGEL’s Universal Desktop Converter is the extended software-based version of the company’s successful PC to TC Conversion Card.  To upgrade third party hardware into IGEL Universal Desktops, customers simply plug in and boot from the USB token.  Afterwards, the IGEL Universal Firmware is installed automatically onto their system. The Universal Desktop Converter comes with three Digital Service Pack options – Entry, Standard, or Advanced – so businesses only pay for what they need by selecting the software platform that best suits their requirements.

In addition to IGEL customers, the Universal Desktop Converter is an option for companies using select third-party thin client hardware, such as HP, Neoware and DELL that want to migrate their existing environment to a homogenous and fully managed IGEL client infrastructure.  IGEL’s Universal Management Suite is also included with the Universal Desktop Converter, allowing businesses to remotely manage thin clients and reduce the time and money spent on hardware support and administration.

Pricing for the Universal Desktop Converter starts at £24.50 +VAT.