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

The 451 Group Snaps Up Research Firm Moss Creek Capital

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The 451 Group has acquired independent equity-research firm Moss Creek Capital in order to expand its services for the professional investment community. Dallas-based Moss Creek provides investment research on publicly traded software companies, offering actionable insight gleaned from conversations with end users, key players in the software distribution channel and company executives. Moss Creek principal Gregg Speicher will remain with the acquired firm.

The acquisition expands the coverage and financial expertise of The 451 Group, an independent analyst firm that covers emerging technologies within the enterprise IT industry.

“The addition of Moss Creek will accelerate our efforts to explain to investors how disruptive technologies will affect large and small public companies,” said Martin V. McCarthy, CEO of The 451 Group. “With major forces such as cloud computing gathering on the horizon, we believe that investors are hungry for deep insight into which companies are going to be winners and losers in the resulting market. We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our firm, and we expect to complete additional acquisitions this year.”

Pano Logic Releases Remote, Upgrades Pano System 2.6

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Pano Logic today announced the newest addition to their product line, Pano Remote, as well as a new version of their flagship product, Pano System 2.6. With the easy to carry Pano Remote USB key, users can now access their Pano managed virtual desktops conveniently and securely when working out of the office away from their Pano devices—without requiring a costly or complex VPN solution. New features of Pano System 2.6 include integration with Pano Remote, easier installation of the Pano Manager virtual appliance using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a new interface called the Collection Creation Wizard for easier configuration of policies for provisioning and managing desktop virtual machines, the ability for administrators to control virtual desktop power state directly from the Pano Manager administrator console, graphic identification and authorization (GINA) application interoperability and standalone VMware ESXi support for small single-server deployments.

Pano Remote allows users of Pano System 2.6 to access their Pano desktop virtual machine from a remote location over the Internet. Delivered as a USB key with embedded software, Pano Remote will run on any Windows XP or Vista computer and does not require the use of VPN software or hardware. Instead, it relies on a communication mechanism bundled with Pano Remote called Pano Gateway. The Pano session may use local printers, local storage drives and a shared clipboard between the local Windows system and the remote virtual desktop. In addition, the administrator can set policies within the Pano Manager that centrally control which capabilities are enabled.

Pano System 2.6 includes a number of new features to improve ease of deployment and interoperability:

  • Pano Collection Creation Wizard – allowing administrators to more easily configure desktop virtual machines by including context sensitive help topics for administrators to find relevant information easily and quickly, and offering administrators more flexibility in defining how automatically provisioned desktop virtual machines are named by Pano Manager.
  • Streamlined Installation of Pano Manager – delivering Pano Manager as a virtual appliance in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), enabling it to easily be imported into VMware Infrastructure in a one-click operation. Additionally, the Pano Manager virtual machine has been optimized for size, speed of download and simplicity of configuration, making the solution the easiest way to get started with desktop virtualization.
  • Standalone VMware ESXi support – providing easy installation of Pano System 2.6 for small deployments, enabling configuration with a single instance of ESXi without requiring VMware vCenter. This option provides an easy entry level solution for small businesses with a convenient upgrade path as needs grow.
  • GINA module interoperability – interoperating with specific applications that install their own GINA modules. Such interoperability simplifies installation and upgrade of Pano Desktop Services on systems that also have authentication solutions such as Imprivata OneSign and Ensure Technologies XyLoc installed.

Additional features include administrative control over the desktop virtual machine power state, device-based control over display and mouse/keyboard settings, tighter integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory Group Policy Objects when installing updates, and improved responsiveness.

Pano System 2.6 is now available with pricing starting at $329 for a single Pano desktop and $35 per USB key for Pano Remote.

Release: Desktop Analysis Pack for Lanamark Suite

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Lanamark today announced availability of the Desktop Analysis Pack for Lanamark Suite. This new analysis pack is designed to help solution providers analyze enterprise desktop environments, identify candidate desktops for virtualization and recommend optimal resource allocation to virtual desktops in order to maximize end user adoption and satisfaction.

The Desktop Analysis Pack distinguishes desktops from laptops to identify mobile users and determines associations between workstations and external devices such as monitors, printers and scanners. It leverages the Lanamark Software Intelligence (LSI) technology to recognize software applications installed versus ones actually used across the enterprise. The combined information about desktop hardware and software enables channel partners to identify desktops most suitable for virtualization, determine what type of thin client devices would be most appropriate for end users and recommend how software applications should be allocated to minimize licensing costs.

Once the analysis phase is completed and candidate desktops for virtualization are identified, solution providers can then leverage the Lanamark Server Virtualization Design Module to build optimal virtual desktop infrastructure solutions across leading virtualization and hardware platforms. The module allows what-if scenarios to be compared side-by-side with comprehensive TCO calculations and enables channel partners to build end-to-end solutions with server, storage and thin client components from Brocade, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NetApp, QLogic, Sun Microsystems, Wyse and Xiotech.

XLink Technology Releases proReplicator 3.0

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XLink Technology announces today the new release of proReplicator 3.0 for Windows 2008/2003/2000/XP systems.

Product Overview: Xlink proReplicator brings data replication to a whole new level, combining both real-time and scheduled data replication for all your mission critical servers. Whether you are concerned about virtual machine backup, database, email or web server continuous data protection (CDP) and disaster recovery, proReplicator will provide a consolidated solution for your enterprise. Data replication in proReplicator could be implemented either scheduled or in real-time, locally or remotely, over LAN or WAN.

Feature Highlights:

  • Manual Failover / Failback, Test-Data on demand with one mouse click. With a very simple user interface, it is only one mouse click to test data on replicas or get system failover / failback between the Primary and a replica.
  • Scheduled or Real-time replication for entire VMware guest OS. Once you go to a virtual environment, you have to look at the virtual machine and make sure that you back it up the same way you do your physical system. It is always necessary to continuously replicate application data from multiple virtual production servers to another backup server either locally or over the WAN, for fully disaster recovery in the event of an outage.

Xlink ProReplicator can be installed on the host OS or a guest OS of VMware server, replicating from the host OS offers not only the benefit of replicating all applications running on the virtual machine(e.g. Exchange server, SQL database server, IIS web server, or file server), but also replicating non-Windows guest OS (e.g. Linux or Solaris x86).

  • Real-time and Application-aware data replication for MSSQL database and IIS web servers. Default replication templates provided for MS SQL database server and IIS web server. User self-defined templates are also supported.
  • Scheduled Automatic Replication. Flexible scheduling allows you to run automatic replication jobs instead of, or in addition to, the Real-Time replication.
  • Scheduled or Real-time data replication to local and remote target locations. ProReplicator provides local and/or remote protection against almost any outage, you can replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you wish.

Key Benefits:

  • One-stop solution for server continuous data protection and disaster recovery.
  • True CDP technology for point-in-time data protection, guarantee database and major applications recoverability.
  • Application-aware data replication to reduce unwanted garbage files.
  • Provides local and/or remote protection against almost any outage, you can replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you wish.
  • Minimization of network bandwidth usage: Real-time replication copies only the modified portion of a file. ProReplicator monitors byte-level change in data. At time of saving them into disk devices, it speeds up performance by using block-level CDP to match disk block IO operations.
  • Data Replication on database and non-database files, as well as dynamically generated Registry Files: The Registry Replication feature meets the needs of some server systems that require certain dynamically changed key definitions of registry matched on the Secondary server for a successful failover.
  • Easy setup and centralized configuration on Primary Master Station

Support Platforms:

  • Supports VMware
  • Supports SQL 2000, 2005 and 2008 and SQLExpress
  • Supports Windows 2008/2003 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows 2000/XP
  • No need for the cost/complexity of the Microsoft clustering
  • No system reboot required on installation

IBM Walks Away From Talks Over Potential Sun Acquisition

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IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems today (Sunday), reports the NY Times, who confirmed the collapse of the talks based on a statement from an unnamed source while several other media, including the Wall Street Journal and ZDNet, were still speculating. The New York Times correctly points out this leaves Sun free to pursue other opportunities for selling itself.

Since last year, Sun executives had been meeting with potential buyers. I.B.M. stepped up, seeing an opportunity to add to its large software business, acquire valuable researchers and consolidate the market for larger, so-called server computers that corporations use in their data centers.

In their talks, I.B.M. and Sun had a contract to deal with each other exclusively. Now, Sun is free to pursue other suitors, including I.B.M. rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Cisco recently entered the market for server computers.

It will be interesting to watch the market react to this on Monday morning.

Hyper9 Introduces H9Labs

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Hyper9 announced on Wednesday the creation of H9Labs, an experimental division of Hyper9 that will research, develop and provide VI administrators with an opportunity to experience and evaluate new and emerging innovations and technologies.

H9Labs is unique because it relies on the community of VI administrators for input on the capabilities they need most to effectively do their job, and user feedback will be crucial to help improve these tools before they attain general availability status.

H9Labs recently announced VI administrator tools developed by H9Labs’s own Andrew Kutz, a well known developer in the VMware community who was recently named a vExpert by VMware.

H9Labs GuessMyOS plug-in replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 client inventory tree with OS-specific icons for both Windows and Linux guest and Virtualization Manager Mobile Beta, which allows the user to manage and monitor their virtual infrastructure from their favorite mobile device. The free H9Labs PowerShell Cmdlts, such as the Out-DataSet cmdlet, is an extremely useful and needed cmdlet as indicated by the VI administrator community. VI admins use it to pipe any type of data that can be formatted with the built-in cmdlet, Format-Table, into a typed Microsoft .NET System.Data.DataSet.