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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

CA Now Support Sun’s Solaris Zones Virtualization Platform

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CA has announced that its virtualization management solutions now support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform.

The expanded support of CA’s Service Assurance and Business-Driven Automation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization platforms helps enterprise and service provider customers to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from their complex virtualized and cloud computing infrastructures.

CA’s highly scalable and enterprise-class virtualization management products fully support Sun’s Solaris Zones virtualization platform, enabling customers to greatly reduce risk by using the same set of tools to centrally manage their virtualized and physical environments.

CA’s proactive performance alerts help customers improve service quality by identifying potential performance issues and quickly pinpointing the root cause of problems. CA’s deep visibility into business transactions and the reliability made innate by the automation of routine activities helps lead to improved operational excellence. The CA solutions also help customers put critical applications into production much faster, leading to much improved agility and faster time to market.

VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta Surfaces

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In the battle for the Mac desktop virtualization market, VMware is preparing its latest soldier with the VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta build (release notes).

Currently, this Beta version has 10+ new and improved features and includes 200+ bug fixes.

These include:

  • More Powerful Graphics Performance for Games & 3D Apps: OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows Vista and Windows 7, DirectX 9.0 SM3 performance improvements, Windows Aero performance improvements, better OpenGL compatibility for modeling apps
  • Improved USB Support: USB “EasyConnect” makes it simple to assign a USB device to a virtual machine or your Mac and then remembers preferred settings for each USB device
  • Support for larger virtual machines: 8-way SMP support added, maximum virtual hard disk size increased from 950 GB to 2 TB
  • Improved Boot Camp Support: Improved disk performance for your Boot Camp VMs, better handling of disk configuration changes to avoid duplicate entries, option to avoid authentication dialogs when using a Boot Camp virtual machine
  • PC Migration Improvements: Migration status displayed on PC, now avoids port conflicts, guest account issues on Mac OS X now resolved
  • User Experience Improvement Program: VMware uses information obtained through the User Experience Improvement Program to improve the quality, reliability, and performance of our products and to plan our future development and testing. Participation in the program is voluntary and you can opt out at any time.
  • Many Additional UI Improvements and 200+ Bugs Fixed

Elastra Launches Trial Version of Enterprise Cloud Server for VMware vSphere 4 Customers

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Elastra Corporation, provider of application infrastructure automation software, today announced the availability of a free trial version of Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server (ECS) for VMware vSphere 4 customers.

In this offering, ECS lets customers compose, orchestrate and deploy application infrastructure to virtualization environments managed with VMware vSphere 4. ECS already supports private clouds based on VMware VCenter or Citrix XEN, as well as the Amazon public cloud. Systems created for one virtualization environment are portable to another. The trial version only supports vSphere 4 environments – no other cloud platforms are supported in the trial version.

Customers interested in using the Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server for vSphere 4 can visit Elastra’s website and complete a short sign-up form to gain access to download location and instructions on using the product.

CA Set To Pick Up Nimsoft for $350 Million

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CA recently announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Nimsoft, a provider of IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for emerging enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs)—in an all-cash transaction valued at $350 million.

The acquisition significantly extends CA’s ability to meet the unique IT management needs of emerging enterprises and MSPs, both of which are playing leading roles in the growth of cloud computing.  CA estimates that emerging enterprises, which it categorizes as organizations with annual revenues from $300 million to $2 billion, will account for approximately a quarter of the software spending in CA’s market space by 2013.  By leveraging Nimsoft’s market expertise and technology, CA expects to add an entirely new set of customers to its base, which historically has been comprised of large enterprises.

Nimsoft’s technology and go-to-market approach also will leverage CA’s presence in growing international markets—where the Company expects cloud computing and hosted/managed services to play a central role in business development.

The Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solution is designed to allow MSPs complete visibility into the performance and availability of their customers’ business applications across both internal and external IT infrastructures.  Its broad capabilities and easy deployment and automated maintenance make it an optimal solution for MSPs. Its automated implementation can help accelerate time-to-value and its advanced features are specifically designed to streamline monitoring of a wide range of business applications for multiple customers—advantages that MSPs around the world are leveraging to improve service, expand offerings, and boost margins.

Nimsoft has developed monitoring and reporting solutions for public cloud and on-demand offerings like Google Apps for Business, The Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com, as well as internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual server environments.

Today’s announcement follows CA’s recent acquisitions of Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore and the planned acquisition of 3Tera.

The acquisition is expected to have minimal impact on fiscal year 2010 results and to be dilutive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2011.

PHD Virtual Names Thomas Charlton Chairman and CEO

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PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of esXpress VM Backup, a multi-VM backup and restore solution, today announced that Thomas Charlton has been appointed Chairman and CEO by the PHD Virtual board of directors.

Prior to joining PHD Virtual, Charlton was the CEO of multiple software companies, including Shunra Software (network emulation and appliances), VoiceGenie Technologies (Voice XML speech platform) and Trailblazer Systems (eCommerce EDI software).

Responsible for each company’s strategic direction, revenue growth, profitability and global expansion, Charlton led Shunra and VoiceGenie to profitability, and led VoiceGenie and Trailblazer Sytems to successful acquisitions by Alcatel and Nu Bridges respectively. Charlton also served as CEO at Tidal Software (enterprise job scheduling) which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems.

Phoenix Technologies Loses, Replaces CFO

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Phoenix Technologies today announced the appointment of Robert Andersen as Interim Chief Financial Officer, effective March 5, 2010.

Mr. Andersen replaces Mr. Richard Arnold, who resigned from Phoenix to pursue other opportunities.

Mr. Andersen joined the Company in 2008 as Vice President of Finance responsible for controllership, financial planning, external reporting, and tax. He has more than 17 years of corporate finance experience. Prior to joining Phoenix, Mr. Andersen spent six years in senior financial roles at Wind River Systems, Inc., a leading embedded systems software company. He began his finance career at Hewlett-Packard Company, where he served in various controller, treasury, and technology finance management roles.