Virtualization.com

Citrix today announced a new 2-for-1 trade-up offer that makes it easy for Citrix XenApp customers to realize all the benefits of desktop virtualization by stepping up to the new XenDesktop 4.

The “Trade-up to XenDesktop 4” program allows XenApp customers to trade up their existing XenApp concurrent user licenses for twice the number of XenDesktop 4 user licenses – a savings of up to 80 percent off list price. With its new FlexCast™ delivery technology, XenDesktop 4 is the first product in the industry to deliver every major type of virtual desktop in a single, integrated solution. XenDesktop 4 further extends the value of desktop virtualization by including all the functionality of XenApp as a core integrated feature, making it easy for customers to deliver on-demand applications as a seamless part of their overall desktop management strategy. By taking advantage of this limited-time trade-up offer, XenApp customers can make virtual desktops a reality for all of their employees at a fraction of the cost.

XenApp customers have already taken an important first step towards centralized desktop management, delivering an estimated 25 million applications to more than 100 million users every day¹. Many of these same customers are now looking to extend the benefits of centralization to all desktops in the enterprise. The new Trade-up to XenDesktop 4 program gives these customers the best of both worlds, allowing them to leverage all the functionality they already own, while adding a simple, low-risk path to full desktop virtualization when they are ready. For many enterprise customers, the upcoming Windows 7 desktop refresh provides the perfect opportunity to choose from a variety of virtual desktop models to simplify desktop management enterprise wide.

For more than 100 million users worldwide, XenApp has consistently proven that it delivers superior performance, security and TCO across a wide variety of use cases, cutting application management costs in half for most customers. With XenApp now included as a core integrated feature of XenDesktop, most customers going forward will find XenDesktop 4 to be the best solution to meet their combined desktop and app virtualization needs.

For customers focused on delivering Windows applications with no plans to step up to desktop virtualization in the near future, the standalone XenApp product line will continue to be the best solution to meet their needs. Because XenApp is sold on a concurrent user basis, it also remains the most cost-effective solution for use cases with high application concurrency ratios. Cloud providers delivering Windows apps as an on-demand service will also find XenApp to be the best solution, as will independent software vendors offering XenApp as a part of their enterprise application platforms.

To take advantage of the full 2-for-1 trade-up offer, customers active on Subscription Advantage must trade up all their existing XenApp licenses. Suggested list pricing for the trade-up begins at $45 per user, plus the normal cost of subscription renewal – a savings of up to 80 percent off the list price of XenDesktop 4.

Additional trade-up offers are available for customers who only wish to exchange a portion of their existing XenApp licenses.

Pano Logic today announced Pano System 2.8, and Pano Dual Monitor, further enhancing the end user experience, increasing scalability and simplifying IT management.

Pano System 2.8 improves the efficiency and convenience of managing deployments while doubling the number of desktops that can be controlled from a single management console. The Pano Dual Monitor is a USB adaptor that allows applications to operate as though two display devices were directly attached. Windows and applications automatically maximise to the physical dimensions of the display without additional software required.  The new release will be the first version of Pano Logic offered by the most recent channel partner for the UK region, STL Technologies, which has delivered valued IT infrastructure solutions to public and commercial sectors for over 40 years.

Unlike thin-clients that bulk up with processors in the endpoint, and add management burden, the Pano System provides end users with a full and dynamic PC experience without compromising simplicity by adding an endpoint processor.  Today’s announcement emphasises Pano Logic’s dedication to redefining the delivery and management of end user computing with innovative technology that radically centralises virtual desktop management.

The Pano System is an all-in-one desktop virtualisation solution.  The system includes Pano Device, a zero client endpoint, and Pano Manager, a unified management interface.  The Pano System unlike any other desktop VDI solution radically centralises 100% computing power to the virtualised server.

There is no processor, no operating system, no memory, no drivers, no software and no moving parts in the Pano Device, resulting in absolutely zero endpoint management.  The lifespan of a Pano zero client device is over 3 times that of a thin client or PC.  The Pano Device retains no data and is secure against any data-loss.  Each zero client Pano Device uses less than 3 watts of power, just 3 percent of what energy efficient PCs use, translating into significant energy savings. The Pano Device connects over an existing IP network to an instance of Microsoft Windows virtualised on a datacenter server.

Pano Manager is a very simple to use web-based management interface that enables administrators to manage the entire virtual desktop deployment.  The Pano Manager interacts with a lightweight service (Pano Direct) residing within each desktop virtual machine that links peripherals attached to the Pano Device to the unmodified Windows drivers residing in the virtual machine. This design guarantees that all existing Windows drivers will work without modification.

VMware today announced the opening of a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington. Throughout its design and build-out, VMware chose industry best practices to create an energy-efficient facility that utilizes cutting-edge technology and maximizes the use of VMware virtualization software. As a result, VMware expects to achieve $5 million in savings per year from the facility.

VMware has significantly reduced its environmental footprint and expects to attain rapid Return on Investment (ROI) on its next-generation datacenter investment through:

• $4 million each year in energy and $1 million each year in location consolidation costs for a total of $5 million in savings per year
• Deployment of virtualization with 100 percent clean, renewable energy
• 70 percent savings in power and equipment, due to air-side economization, the practice of using free outside air to cool the facility
• A targeted Power Utilization Rate (PUE) of between 1.2 – 1.5 — well below the industry standard of 2 – 2.4

Pending application for LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council. LEED is the internationally recognized green building certification system.

The VMware facility employed industry-leading solutions designed to enable datacenters to run more efficiently, including:

• Hydroelectric power to deliver cost savings without carbon emissions
• Hydroelectric power, which is green and more sustainable than other energy resources, is the sole source of power for VMware’s datacenter, which is expected to save the company approximately 50 percent in power rates alone.

Airside economizers allow VMware to use the state of Washington’s cold outside air to cool its datacenter facility nearly year-round. By leveraging outside air, VMware is able to significantly lower its use of commercial grade air conditioning and create a power cost offset. As a result, the company expects to reduce its air conditioning utilization by 50-75 percent over time. In addition, the free, outside air allows VMware to use less power to cool its computer equipment, resulting in an additional 20-30 percent gain in energy savings.

To reduce on-going operating costs, VMware chose to adopt containment methodology to make its datacenter more efficient. Rather than operate a mixed air environment, VMware elected to isolate the cool air from the hot, and use rooftop air conditioning units — where the hot air is returned and the heat then siphoned off to warm the office area — to reuse typically wasted, server-generated heat. This hot aisle containment strategy greatly improves the efficiency of VMware’s air handling equipment, further driving down power requirements. By eliminating the need for a compressor in favor of a fan on most days, the company also avoids wasting hydroelectric power. VMware estimates the cost savings for this system to be approximately $500,000 per year.

Like many of its customers, VMware has deployed its industry leading virtualization platform, VMware vSphere 4, because it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting while also reducing equipment, power, cooling and real estate costs.

As a result, VMware operates its datacenter more cost effectively, and provides less business interruption because of fewer outages, less downtime and fewer maintenance issues.

VMware customers can reduce their energy costs and consumption by up to 80 percent through virtualization. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 5-15 percent of the time they are powered on, yet most industry-standard hardware consumes 60-90 percent of the normal workload power even when idle. VMware virtualization has advanced resource and memory management features that enable consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85 percent. Once virtualized, VMware’s Distributed Power Management (DPM) monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. With VMware virtualization, customers can dramatically reduce energy consumption without sacrificing reliability or service levels.

The new datacenter will support VMware’s internal IT department, as well as become a testing ground for VMware’s R&D group to rapidly develop and deliver new products to market.

Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced that its newest version of Veeam Monitor and Veeam Monitor Free Edition has redefined VMware performance monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and troubleshooting.

Now both versions support Veeam Business View, which means IT professionals can monitor their VMware environments based on business criteria. This helps them identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows them to create flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and impact to business.

Veeam Monitor has become the industry standard for VMware monitoring. It is integrated with VMware vCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of an organization’s virtual machines. Not only does it support and extend VMware’s management framework, which offloads the monitoring burden from vCenter and results in enhanced performance, but it also can support multiple vCenters and display performance data from the entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen—no matter how large the VMware deployment.

While VMware vCenter does provide a view of the VMware infrastructure, it’s an administrative/technical view, which shows virtual machines grouped by datacenters, clusters, or ESX and ESXi hosts. IT professionals can use VM folders to manually group VMs based on business criteria, but maintaining these folders requires daily error-prone manual procedures, and they are limited to only one categorization dimension.

In addition to its integration with Veeam Monitor, Veeam Business View is also integrated with Veeam Reporter Enterprise, the Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware and the nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware.

Veeam Monitor 4.5 is available immediately, with North American pricing beginning at $250 USD per socket. The upgrade is available at no charge to Veeam Monitor customers currently on maintenance.

Evans Data Corp today announced that Google is the company that developers think of as having the best ability to execute in a public cloud setting while IBM is strongest for the private cloud, according to a recent survey of over 400 software developers published this week in an Evans Data Market Alert.

The survey, conducted in September, measured developers’ perceptions of leading vendors in the cloud space including Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T, Rackspace, VMware, Sun, and HP, among others. Adoption, adoption intentions, completeness of offering, and ability to execute were rated by the developers along with capabilities such as security, scalability, low latency, reliability, no vendor lock-in, and cost to value ratio. In addition, developers positioned the vendors as better suited to either public or private cloud offerings.

The survey report, which is free with registration, can be found here.

Amazon was seen as having the most complete solution today, but Google was thought to have more ability to execute, and Google topped Amazon in most other categories. Additionally, adoption intentions in the next 12 months were much stronger for Google than for Amazon. IBM was thought to be able to provide the most secure cloud environment and was also rated high in reliability and ability to execute – qualities essential to large enterprises considering private or hybrid clouds.