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

Voonami Lands Virtual Desktop Service on UTOPIA

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Voonami announced today that it is launching its Virtual Desktop Service on the UTOPIA network.

The Virtual Desktop Service utilizes thin client technology to offer customers the benefits of cloud computing at their desktop. Voonami is the only UTOPIA service provider offering cloud computing and virtual desktop services over UTOPIA’s fiber network using its green data center solutions.

The “cloud” is simply data stored on remote servers or super computers located in secure data centers rather than on an individual desktop computer. Most users today access this technology through applications like web-based email programs. Voonami’s Virtual Desktop Service replaces individual personal computers with zero clients, a much smaller device, that communicates with a super computer located in Voonami’s disaster proof data centers to access all of the company’s software, applications and data. These super computers are all redundantly secured and backed up, meaning that all your data is safe, secure, and accessible from anywhere.

By moving your software and applications to a secure data center, the zero client system increases speeds, ensures your data is protected, eliminates capital expenditures for new hardware and PC maintenance costs, decreases the risks of theft, ensures application and software version control, and offers seamless telecommuting capabilities. Companies are able to increase their memory or hard drive space dynamically while having increased efficiencies and access to the latest technology, all managed by Voonami.

Release: Public Beta Of Stratavia’s Data Palette Express

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Stratavia announced today the public beta of Data Palette Express, a downloadable version of their data center automation software that can be deployed for free on up to 10 servers.

Data Palette Express includes many of the features offered by Data Palette Enterprise including point-and-click application provisioning, code deployments, and maintenance for enterprise-class application servers and databases. The beta release of Data Palette Express will be available on March 15th.

Data Palette Express is a limited version of Data Palette that can be deployed on up to 10 servers for free, and ships with out-of-the box operations for application stack lifecycle management. Data Palette Express includes features for installations, patch deployments, code releases, user maintenance, and backup operations – all from a Web-based self-service console.

Customers have the option to upgrade their free version of Data Palette Express to the commercial Enterprise edition of Data Palette that offers broader deployment rights, full support and out-of-the-box functionality for VMware SpringSource, IBM WebSphere, Microsoft IIS, and Oracle WebLogic application servers as well as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Sybase ASE databases running on all UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms. Stratavia also offers a hosted version of Data Palette Enterprise that is available through their network of hosting partners via the “Automation by Stratavia” program.

Flexiant Launches New Platform “Extility”, Both in Licensing and Public Platform Offerings

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Launched today by Flexiant, the software and services company, Extility is a licensed virtualised cloud platform delivering all of the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API.

Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days. Licensees of Extility will not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they will be able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years (Source: Gartner).

Extility’s licensees will see substantial capital expenditure savings, streamlining of technical resource and progressive efficiencies in server utilisation, allowing them more effectively to achieve business acquisition and profitability targets. Reduced energy consumption will slash operating costs and significantly shrink carbon footprint – a central consideration in an increasingly environmentally conscious business ecosystem. Importantly, in these times of challenging margins and market fluidity, sales gestation periods will be shortened dramatically through accelerated delivery timescales, in turn reducing time to invoice and to attain positive, profitable cash flow. Extility will significantly enhance licensee profiles and product offerings through seamless branding and bringing real commercial gains to their customers.

FlexiScale 2.0 brings new opportunity to the Cloud Virtualisation reseller market and exciting new functionality to end users: Leading edge differentiation and value creation

FlexiScale 2.0, is a complete rebuild of Europe’s first cloud platform using Flexiant’s revolutionary Extility technology. FlexiScale 2.0 not only allows end-users to benefit from a wholly scalable hosting infrastructure but also reaches out to the wider world of IT services delivery companies with the opportunity to extend their offering to existing customers, whilst differentiating their services in a progressively demanding market place where most IT services have been, or are seen to have been, commoditised.

Flexiant’s Resellers and Affiliates will be able to rapidly leverage their existing customer base to take advantage of FlexiScale’s platform independent infrastructure, bringing immediate improvement to bottom-line performance, whilst delivering highly dependable world class services to their customers.

Currently in its final Beta testing cycle, FlexiScale 2.0 will launch on 23rd March 2010. Additional information will be released closer to the launch date indicating how and where you can participate in this exciting opportunity. In the interim, Flexiant’s channel development team is seeking to sign up early adopter resellers across a range of sectors.

VMware Announces Authorization of $400 Million Stock Repurchase Program

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VMware today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the purchase of up to $400 million of its Class A common stock through the end of 2011.

Stock will be purchased from time to time, in the open market or through private transactions, subject to market conditions.

The Company expects the equity purchase program to help partially offset dilution from its equity programs and believes it to be an appropriate use of proceeds from the exercise of employee stock options.

Altor Secures Series $10 Million Series B Round from DAG Ventures, Juniper Networks & Others

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Altor Networks, provider of security for virtualized data centers and clouds, today announced that the company has closed a Series B funding round with new investors DAG Ventures, Juniper Networks with its newly announced Junos Innovation Fund, Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, Altor’s founding investors.

This new financing of $10 million will enable Altor to significantly expand global sales and marketing. Altor recently completed a record fiscal quarter, despite the challenging economic environment, adding customers of all sizes in all verticals including the financial sector, higher education and cloud service providers.

“Altor impressed us with its superior technology and deeply experienced team in the realm of virtual security. The challenges of virtual and cloud security are real and prevalent, presenting an enormous market opportunity. We’re enthusiastic about Altor’s market-leading products and unique approach to addressing these emerging security gaps,” said John Caddedu, Managing Director at DAG Ventures.

We urge you to find out more about Altor’s  approach to virtualization and cloud security at www.altornetworks.com.

Citrix Touts New “End-to-End” Virtual Networking Solution

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Citrix Systems today announced Citrix Branch Repeater VPX, the WAN optimization virtual appliance that provides a high definition desktop and application experience to thousands of branch offices worldwide, and Citrix Access Gateway VPX, the secure access virtual appliance that provides safe application access to users from anywhere.

With these new products, Citrix is changing the industry landscape by extending the benefits of server and desktop virtualization to virtual network services running at both the datacenter and the branch office.

The two new virtual appliances join Citrix NetScaler VPX, the industry-leading application acceleration and load-balancing virtual appliance, (see “Citrix Delivers NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance and Unveils Citrix Ready Open Networking Program”), Together, these virtual networking solutions accelerate and secure virtual desktops and applications from thousands of enterprise datacenters and cloud providers to users anywhere, on-demand, anytime. By combining all the benefits of hardware network appliances with the simplicity, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of software appliances, Citrix now offers the industry’s only complete end-to-end networking system.

The Citrix VPX solution represents the company’s leadership in creating a fundamentally different approach to the growing convergence of virtualization and networking technologies in the modern datacenter and emerging cloud architectures. By offering open, flexible solutions that work with the technology customers have already invested in, Citrix allows them to extend the value of their existing investments in the network and branch offices in ways they never thought possible before.

With physical network appliances, IT organizations grapple with inefficient procurement, trial and deployment cycles while increasing the complexity associated with hardware proliferation and management. IT loses agility in the branch office due to infrastructure availability problems, resulting in high cost and delays of new branch office setup. Citrix virtual network appliances help transform the economics and agility of IT services by leveraging industry-standard server hardware and virtualization in the network infrastructure. By simplifying and expediting procurement, trials, and deployment for enterprises, Citrix improves availability of desktops and applications, and enables dynamic provisioning to meet varying user demand. By virtualizing the branch and network infrastructure, organizations can simplify and lower the TCO of network infrastructure in branch offices as well as in datacenters.

Network virtualization also improves the economics of cloud computing by providing a flexible and cost-effective deployment model for delivering customized network services. Virtualized network appliances simplify the complexity and challenges of supporting and managing multi-tenant cloud environments. The Citrix end-to-end virtualization networking solution enables cloud service providers to offer value-added services, such as application acceleration, secure access and WAN optimization on a per-tenant basis. Cloud service providers can leverage Citrix Service Provider subscription pricing to offer on-demand network services to their customers, eliminating large, up-front capital expenditures and enhancing the elasticity and profitability of service offerings.

By virtualizing the foundational network services and deploying the Citrix VPX solution on any off-the-shelf hardware, enterprises can now realize reduced bandwidth costs, simplified branch infrastructure, faster performance and better security. Specific benefits include:

  • Flexible Deployment – The Citrix VPX solution enables flexible datacenter and branch deployment options requiring minimum changes to the underlying network infrastructure.
  • Lower TCO for Hardware – The Citrix VPX solution provides significant cost savings from hardware standardization, lower energy consumption and faster new branch office setup.
  • On-Demand Provisioning – The Citrix VPX solution increases agility, scalability, performance and availability with on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual network appliances.
  • Flexible and Affordable Pricing Model – The Citrix VPX solution provides flexible Pay-As-You-Grow pricing models, allowing service providers and enterprises to offer security and acceleration services based on demand.

Citrix Access Gateway VPX is available today and Citrix Branch Repeater VPX will be released later this month.

Both will be available from Citrix Solution Advisors worldwide. Later in 2010, Access Gateway VPX Express and Branch Repeater VPX Express will also be available for free download here.