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NX Announces Virtual Hosting Service Contract for Special Olympics

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INX announced today that it has started its Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for the production IT environment of Special Olympics Northern California.

Special Olympics Northern California (SONC) is like many businesses – too small to cost effectively implement and manage its own data center virtual infrastructure, but too big to ignore the inefficiencies and high costs of maintaining a physical infrastructure. As a result, they turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for their server and desktop provisioning, all of which were converted to virtual machines and are now hosted at INX’s data center facility in Sacramento, California.

SpringSource Partners Up With VMware For Spring-Powered Enterprise Virtualization Offering

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SpringSource today announced at SpringOne Americas 2008 a new relationship with VMware that will help organizations to seamlessly develop and deploy Spring applications in VMware virtualized environments.

The collaboration with VMware, a SpringSource Certified Solutions Partner, includes integration between SpringSource Tool Suite, an Eclipse-powered development environment for building enterprise applications using the Spring Portfolio, and VMware Workstation to enable the dynamic creation of virtual machines on developer desktops.

SpringSource is also developing two open source application-server virtual appliances – the SpringSource tc Server and dm Server virtual appliances. When run on VMware Infrastructure, these appliances will enable the portability of enterprise Java applications across desktop and data center environments. SpringSource dm Server is a completely modular, OSGi-based Java server designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability. SpringSource tc Server is the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat – the most widely used Java application server – hardened for enterprise use and coupled with mission-critical operational capabilities and support that systems administrators require.

SpringSource Tool Suite integration with VMware Workstation will enable development and QA professionals to quickly and easily specify virtual server configurations for different development and test scenarios. These virtual appliances will allow developers to select a variety of build targets with different operating systems and application server configurations without needing additional physical hardware – dramatically accelerating software development times and reducing hardware costs. Virtual appliance configuration, deployment and debugging will be integrated with the SpringSource Tool Suite, and ready-to-use virtual images will be provided for dm Server, tc Server and Apache Tomcat.

The first SpringSource/VMware commercial offerings are scheduled for availability in January 2009.

DataCore And Promark Set Up A Distribution Partnership

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DataCore Software and Promark Technology today announced a new distribution relationship under which Promark Technology will distribute DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions in the United States.

DataCore storage virtualization software removes physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that frequently slow down, interrupt or endanger computer operations – making it practical for organizations large and small to get the fullest utilization, highest availability and fastest performance from their disk storage assets by consolidating and automating essential data protection measures and storage management practices.

Ideally suited for VMware and other virtual server customers, DataCore is unique in providing true high-availability, auto-failover/failback business continuity and DR solutions that are perfect for SMB customers, but perform to meet the needs of enterprise customers – at prices starting under $10,000.

DataCore Software is manufacturer-independent software that runs on any industry standard server or virtual server. It is certified on all the major virtual server platforms, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, and supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections. As a result, DataCore provides a persistent solution that survives hardware obsolescence and under DataCore’s unique “Carry-forward” Value Protection Program is fully upgradeable without penalty.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services Deploys VMware Infrastructure 3

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VMware today announced that Siemens IT Solutions and Services has deployed VMware’s management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3.

Siemens has joined with the VMware vCloud Initiative by developing a virtualized private cloud environment with VMware Infrastructure to provide capacity on demand for mission-critical applications. Siemens used the VMware platform to build out its cloud environment, improve server utilization from 20 percent to over 60 percent, and reduce hardware expenditures by approximately 70 percent compared to the cost of building a cloud environment without virtualization.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services, an operating company of Siemens Corporation, offers consulting services, systems integration, software development, and IT infrastructure management. The business unit has annual revenue of $7 billion. Siemens is using VMware Infrastructure to help both internal and external customers address significant business challenges, including the need for green IT, cost reduction, business innovation, more effective customer service, and faster time to market. The VMware platform also gives Siemens cost-effective and reliable disaster recovery and a resilient application environment that enables delivery of service availability up to 99.99 percent.

Microsoft Deepens Partnership With HP

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Microsoft today announced expanded product, sales and services initiatives with HP aimed at helping businesses more easily adopt and deploy virtualization. Microsoft has expanded its work together with HP to sell and market storage, server and networking consolidation solutions and desktop virtualization solutions to small-, medium-sized- and large-business customers worldwide.

Today’s announcements include the following:

  • In the U.S., Microsoft is working with HP to offer products, training and deployment services for storage, networking and server consolidation that are designed to help customers decrease costs, increase business agility, improve data access and protection, and increase employee productivity.
  • Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft System Center are supported on the new industry-standard HP Virtual Connect 10Gb Flex-10 module, which works with the Flex-10 NIC on the recently introduced HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. Together these technologies help enable customers to significantly lower costs with their server and network consolidation, business continuity, and dynamic datacenter projects.
  • The HP and Microsoft Frontline Partner Program in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has registered 60 percent of eligible partners across 36 countries to receive access to virtualization training, sales tools, marketing materials, workshops, and incentives targeting small and medium-sized businesses.
  • Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) features will be delivered in the HP ProLiant PRO Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, running on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, in December 2008. PRO is a feature of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that enables dynamic management of virtual machines and the associated host platforms.
  • HP provides comprehensive services, built on Microsoft technologies, for customers to virtualize their desktops and data centers. The services address strategy, design, transition, operation and continual improvement. HP offers virtualization workshops and proofs-of-concept as the first step for virtualization projects. HP also provides education and support for technology staff as well as services to develop a strategic technology road map using best practices to consolidate and manage infrastructure.
  • HP Business Service Automation will enable automation of change and configuration management processes across virtual and physical environments for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments, and will integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 for managing advanced platform capabilities, while decreasing downtime associated with uncontrolled change. HP is scheduled to release a beta in the first quarter of 2009.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

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As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.