Partnerships

Parallels Desktop for Mac To Be Part Of Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription

May 5, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Last week, Parallels announced that its Parallels Desktop for Mac software will be made available as part of the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription. The company claims this will enable millions of designers using Mac computers to use Microsoft’s Expression Studio to design desktop and web-based graphical interfaces.

“Including Parallels Desktop for Mac in the Microsoft Expression Subscription gives designers a valuable tool for working across platforms,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. “It is further evidence of the productivity benefits that our virtualization software offers customers, and strengthens our ongoing partnership with Microsoft.”

The Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription is will be available from Microsoft in June 2008 and will cost $999 ERP.

In addition to the Parallels Desktop for Mac software, the Expression Professional Subscription includes:

Expression Studio
Visual Studio 2008 Standard
Office 2007 Standard
Windows XP SP2
Windows Vista Business Edition
Pre-configured virtualized server environments

For additional information, you’re invited to visit www.microsoft.com/expression.

[Source: VMBlog]

Parallels Named Red Herring 100 Award Finalist

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Server virtualization firm Parallels has been named a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Awards‘ selection of the most innovative private technology companies based in North America.

In preparation for the formal announcement of its Top 100 Award, the Red Herring editorial board surveyed the entrepreneurial scene throughout the North American region and identified the top 200 out of more than 800 closely evaluated companies that are “leading the next wave of innovation”.

Evaluations were made on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, innovation, management, strategy, and ecosystem integration.

Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring noted:

”We can see the exciting evolution of the technology sector reflected in the quality and variety of exceptional companies that we had to choose from in putting our list together. It was tough to choose just 200 finalists from such a large list of excellent contenders, and we are very happy with the quality of the companies we selected as finalists.”

According to Red Herring, Parallels is on the list due to its innovative and entrepreneurial achievements. The 100 winning companies will be announced at the Red Herring North America event, May 12-14, in San Jose.

[Source: The Hosting News]

Nortel Spinoff Blade Network Technologies Aims To Virtualize Datacenter Racks

April 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

BLADE Network Technologies, the data-center server-switch company spun off from Nortel two years ago, announces the availability of its new RackSwitch network virtualization switches—the only switches designed specifically for IBM’s iDataPlex, an inexpensive, custom-configured rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency to address Web 2.0-style computing (see iDataPlex coverage on GigaOM and Ars Technica).

From the press release:

RackSwitch provides the high-bandwidth communications for IBM iDataPlex in today’s massive scale-out data centers that run I/O-intensive Web 2.0 applications and seek to make the most efficient use of the cloud computing model. Leveraging IBM and BLADE’s common blade server heritage, RackSwitch enables iDataPlex to increase the density networking within a single rack, use significantly less power for networking while maximizing bandwidth available to a single system, employ server-friendly cooling of the networking subsystem and provide 100-percent interoperability with existing network infrastructures. BLADE’s RackSwitch delivers standardized networking with the lowest latency and highest throughput, line-rate/non-blocking switching performance at 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit, with stacking and unified management.

Blade claims leadership in this particular market, having installed more than four million ports connecting more than 800,000 HP, IBM and NEC server blades, with products deployed across 26 market segments.

BLADE’s RackSwitch G8100, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 24 lossless, low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) ports, is designed to equip iDataPlex in high-performance clusters that require 10 Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth with latency of 300 nanoseconds or less. BLADE’s RackSwitch G8000, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for uplinks and/or stacking, is designed for the use of iDataPlex for emerging high-volume cloud computing environments.

BLADE’s new RackSwitch products are available for iDataPlex in the US and Canada in June and globally by the end of the year at a starting price of US$5,500. The company will demonstrate the new switches at next week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas.

[Source: New York Times / NetworkWorld]

Raptor Networks And Pirelli Successfully Complete Chassis Virtualization Testing

April 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Raptor Networks Technology today announced the successful completion of interoperability testing and chassis virtualization testing over distance with Pirelli’s City+ CWDM & DWDM Multiservice platform (PDF). Joint demonstrations of both companies’ technologies are planned for the upcoming Networld Interop Show in Las Vegas from April 22 – May 2, 2008.

“We are pleased to collaborate with Raptor Networks to bring to market the value of the first distributed core switching combined with the optical bandwidth efficiency of the Pirelli City+ carrier-class system,” added Pierluigi Franco, senior vice president, Sales & Marketing for Systems at PGT Photonics (a daughter company to Pirelli).

Red Hat Embraces AMD Virtualization Capabilities In HP Servers

April 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Red Hat today announced its support for virtualization capabilities offered by AMD processors in new HP servers.

The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 platform supports AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology, for more efficient use of memory management on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. HP is now offering systems equipped with these processors in its HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers, Red Hat said. Also, support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs has now been added.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

“Red Hat also is offering para-virtualized device drivers to make I/O workloads in virtual guests perform close to the bare-metal performance of the system”, said Doug Shakshober, senior consulting engineer at Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 has been shipping since November 2007.

[Source: Test Center Daily]

YuuZoo Deploys Virtual Iron Solution To Streamline IT Infrastructure

April 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Virtual Iron today announced that YuuZoo, one of the world’s premier, mobile content aggregators, is deploying Virtual Iron’s solution across its content management system and mobile content distribution platforms in Singapore and the US. The company expects significant benefit from the software, including reduction of its server environment by almost half, streamlined management of its computing environment, easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users, and cost-efficient business continuity capabilities. YuuZoo is working with ICSP Solutions out of Singapore to deploy the Virtual Iron solution.

“We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before ICSP introduced the Virtual Iron solution,” said Anthony Cacciola, CTO for YuuZoo in Singapore. “The Virtual Iron feature set is comprehensive yet easy to use and manage. This is a solution that can deliver on our needs now and continue to meet them as we grow and expand our virtualization initiative.”

YuuZoo has built a global distribution network that enables personalized distribution of wireless value-added services and advertising to billions of mobile end users, offering wireless content owners and developers, advertisers and media companies exciting new revenue possibilities. The YuuZoo network includes access to more than 200 leading wireless carriers, portals and wireless phone manufacturers in over 50 countries across the globe, enabling a reach to more than half of the world’s 3 billion mobile subscribers. The upstream media network includes hundreds of leading wireless content developers and owners giving YuuZoo one of the world’s largest content libraries designed specifically for mobile phone use.

The company currently supports about 50 internal users in four offices and mobile applications located in four different co-location sites using 40 servers in its Windows/Linux environment. Working with ICSP Solutions, Virtual Iron and Dell, YuuZoo expects to reduce its number of servers to eight. In addition to the savings on servers, the company also expects significant reductions in its power, cooling and space requirements. Using two Dell blade server (4 Blades each) SANs and Virtual Iron, YuuZoo has also been able reduce its co-location space from four sites to two, significantly reducing its hosting costs.

Virtual Iron combines an open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities. It also includes an automated X2V conversion software solution that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities from Intel and AMD to deliver near native performance. The software offers large memory support (up to 128 GB), large SMP capabilities (up to 8 virtual CPUs) and the ability to virtualize server platforms with up to 32 physical CPUs.

[Source: VMBlog]