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

App-DNA, Citrix Ink Global Agreement

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App-DNA has today signed a global agreement with Citrix covering its AppTitude application compatibility testing product.

The agreement gives Citrix Consulting Services access to AppTitude, and will be used to help Citrix customers accelerate implementation of on-demand applications in a virtual desktop deployment.

By undertaking a thorough runtime analysis of file permissions and performance data, as well as a static binary analysis, AppTitude determines the optimum methodology for migrating applications, and provides a roadmap for modifications and further testing. The information provided is a solid foundation for accurately assessing the cost and schedule impact of the overall migration program.

Many enterprise-class customers are keen to exploit the compelling operational, environmental, cost and performance benefits offered by desktop virtualization along with on-demand application delivery, especially as they migrate to Windows 7. In preparing recommended program plans for customers, Citrix consulting services using AppTitude, can rapidly present a migration strategy that addresses the steps needed to virtualize the entire applications portfolio and delivering them on-demand for both physical and virtual desktops.

This agreement builds on an already strong relationship between the companies. For the last two years, there has been extensive cooperation in the development of AppTitude’s capabilities, aimed at helping migrate applications to Citrix’s desktop virtualization solutions. Under the agreement, App-DNA will also provide exclusive access for Citrix Consulting Services to a web portal that offers:

  • Fully configured virtual machine and full-install AppTitude product
  • Multi-level training system to meet the needs of individual Citrix staff

VMware Express: A Datacenter On The Go

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Today, VMware unveiled the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV.

This mobile datacenter, demo environment and briefing center has been built to bring VMware solutions directly to our customers across the USA and Canada during the 2010 Virtualization Tour. The VMware Express is sponsored by Cisco, EMC, Dell, MDS, NetApp, Xsigo, ChipPC, Amulet Hotkey and Teradici.

There are 5 demo stations covering both VMware desktop and server virtualization solutions.

Customers will have the unique opportunity to get hands on and dig deep into solutions with VMware Experts. There are demos highlighting the following products and solutions:

VMware View

  • Best User Experience – Highlighting the power of the PCoIP display protocol to deliver a rich user experience, perfectly adapted for the network connection and end-point device.
  • Follow-Me Desktop – Enabling immediate access to desktops, applications and data while ensuring a consistent user experience across sessions and endpoint devices.
  • Access Across Boundaries – Providing access to desktops, applications and data anytime, anywhere regardless of network availability.
  • Windows 7 Migration – Reducing the costs and complexity associated with desktop and application migration.

Release: Wind River Hypervisor 1.1

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Wind River today released an updated version of Wind River Hypervisor, its embedded virtualization solution for single and multicore processors.

The new Wind River Hypervisor 1.1 release supports the latest Intel processors and enables new inter-virtual machine communication capabilities. Additionally, debugging of virtual boards is now supported by the latest version of Wind River On-Chip Debugging.

Wind River Hypervisor makes it easier for customers to consolidate systems and adopt virtualization and multicore technology in embedded devices. New features of Wind River Hypervisor include:

  • Support for the latest Intel microarchitecture codename Nehalem-based processors, such as the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series as well as Intel Core i5 processor and Intel Core i7 processor utilizing advanced virtualization hardware assist capabilities.
  • Integration with Wind River’s industry leading operating systems, including the latest versions of VxWorks and Wind River Linux, while also supporting other operating systems for greater flexibility.
  • Additional capabilities for inter-virtual machine communication, including support for MIPC (multicore/multi-OS interprocess communication), and virtual network and serial ports.
  • When used in conjunction with recently released Wind River On-Chip Debugging 3.2, optimized for development of multicore, multi-OS and virtualized environments, developers can debug the most complex system-level issues such as race conditions, memory corruption and core synchronization.

Wind River plans to broaden processor support for existing processor architectures, along with introducing additional processor architectures, including Freescale QorIQ, to Wind River Hypervisor throughout this year.

Multicore and virtualization are changing the way the embedded device market develops next-generation devices by providing more processing power, while lowering energy consumption, which can lead to a dramatic reduction in bill-of-material cost. First launched in June 2009, Wind River Hypervisor allows device software developers to take advantage of multicore and virtualization to configure unicore and multicore processors quickly and easily, thereby decreasing time-to-market for next-generation devices.

Wind River Hypervisor is a type 1 embedded hypervisor featuring a small footprint, minimal latency for device access, plus deterministic capabilities and optimizations for maximum performance. Wind River Hypervisor supports a variety of different processor architectures, taking advantage of hardware virtualization support when applicable. Embedded developers are utilizing hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems and reduce complexity and hence risk when integrating multicore processors.

Champion Cloud Services Introduces “Cloud Continuity” Disaster Recovery Offering

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Champion Cloud Services, a unit of IT services delivery provider Champion Solutions Group, today announced a data recovery program that promises to remake the Disaster Recovery (DR) realm: “Cloud Continuity” DR services.

Leveraging the groundbreaking benefits of cloud computing, Champion’s Cloud Continuity services allow enterprises—especially growing mid-market businesses—to utilize an on-demand DR capability that delivers exactly the amount of IT resources needed, at the very time they’re needed most.

Unlike traditional disaster recovery paradigms, Champion’s Cloud Continuity solution requires no expensive outlays for a Disaster Recovery infrastructure comprised of defined hardware and software. In the event of an anticipated emergency, the infrastructure is “turned on” and automatically synchronizes with the data for full application availability; afterward it is restored into the business’ onsite, primary infrastructure. Customers pay only for the resources used during the disaster incidence.

Because every customer’s Disaster Recovery requirements are different, Champion Cloud Services is able to set a customized monthly DR fee based on the customer’s Recovery Time Objective (minimum acceptable downtime) and Recovery Point Objective (age of restored files).

Terracotta Teams Up With Eucalyptus Systems

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Terracotta, the leader in simple scalability for Java applications, and Eucalyptus Systems, creators of n open source private cloud platform, today announced a partnership to provide enterprises with an open source solution that maximizes data scalability and application performance in a private cloud environment.

Under the agreement, the two companies will provide tighter integration between Terracotta technology and Eucalyptus software as well as engage in joint sales and marketing activities.

Enterprises adopting cloud architectures can face challenges related to the elastic provisioning of compute clouds on existing data center infrastructure and the inability of the data layer to scale at the same rate as the compute layer. Now, the combination of Eucalyptus and Terracotta allows large-scale enterprises to provision private clouds on the Amazon AWS-compatible Eucalyptus private cloud platform and easily capitalize on the elasticity, latency and flexibility of the cloud.

Terracotta provides customers access to a seamless scalability continuum through data virtualization. With simple configuration changes, applications can scale from a single server using industry-standard interfaces such as Ehcache to many nodes, even in highly virtualized environments such as private clouds. Terracotta provides users with optimum data tier scalability and performance by addressing the biggest bottleneck in deploying private clouds; relational databases that cannot scale to meet the demand of the expanding application and are ill-suited for cloud architectures.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each.