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Novell Offers Solution For Workload Management In The “Mixed IT Data Center”

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Novell today announced significant enhancements to its PlateSpin Workload Management solution. The new PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate, PlateSpin Protect and PlateSpin Orchestrate enable customers to profile, migrate, protect and manage server workloads between physical and virtual infrastructures in heterogeneous IT environments. Through these new enhancements, PlateSpin Workload Management is the only solution on the market today to support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all leading hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Virtual Server, VMware ESX and ESXi and Xen integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

As data centers increasingly deploy diverse hardware platforms, operating systems and virtualization technologies in heterogeneous environments, the artificial boundaries between physical and virtual machines are being erased by portable workloads – the combination of an operating system, application and data software independent from the underlying physical or virtual platform. PlateSpin Workload Management enables data center administrators to optimize the distribution of workloads to provide the best performance for users and applications across both physical and virtual machines. As a result, customers can transform their IT environment into a more efficient and resilient next-generation data center.

PlateSpin Workload Management has added key functionality that makes PlateSpin a critical component of the day-to-day operation of the next-generation data center. PlateSpin Recon, PlateSpin Migrate and PlateSpin Protect are available now. PlateSpin Orchestrate will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

IBM Releases Virtual Desktop To Rival VMware View

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IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included. Wall Street Journal calls it a ‘Microsoft-free’ desktop.

This comes off the heels of VMware’s release of View 3.

None of the pieces of the IBM bundle, available immediately, are new, but the bundled solution makes it easier and cheaper for companies to deploy a complete VDI solution on Linux, IBM maintains. IBM’s OCCS includes Lotus Symphony, its implementation of the ODF-based OpenOffice, as well as Lotus Notes and other applications.

Virtual Bridges’ Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment runs about $49 per seat, while Canonical is about $50 per seat. IBM Lotus Symphony is free but the Notes and other applications are priced separately.

NX Announces Virtual Hosting Service Contract for Special Olympics

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INX announced today that it has started its Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for the production IT environment of Special Olympics Northern California.

Special Olympics Northern California (SONC) is like many businesses – too small to cost effectively implement and manage its own data center virtual infrastructure, but too big to ignore the inefficiencies and high costs of maintaining a physical infrastructure. As a result, they turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Hosting Service for their server and desktop provisioning, all of which were converted to virtual machines and are now hosted at INX’s data center facility in Sacramento, California.

SpringSource Partners Up With VMware For Spring-Powered Enterprise Virtualization Offering

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SpringSource today announced at SpringOne Americas 2008 a new relationship with VMware that will help organizations to seamlessly develop and deploy Spring applications in VMware virtualized environments.

The collaboration with VMware, a SpringSource Certified Solutions Partner, includes integration between SpringSource Tool Suite, an Eclipse-powered development environment for building enterprise applications using the Spring Portfolio, and VMware Workstation to enable the dynamic creation of virtual machines on developer desktops.

SpringSource is also developing two open source application-server virtual appliances – the SpringSource tc Server and dm Server virtual appliances. When run on VMware Infrastructure, these appliances will enable the portability of enterprise Java applications across desktop and data center environments. SpringSource dm Server is a completely modular, OSGi-based Java server designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability. SpringSource tc Server is the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat – the most widely used Java application server – hardened for enterprise use and coupled with mission-critical operational capabilities and support that systems administrators require.

SpringSource Tool Suite integration with VMware Workstation will enable development and QA professionals to quickly and easily specify virtual server configurations for different development and test scenarios. These virtual appliances will allow developers to select a variety of build targets with different operating systems and application server configurations without needing additional physical hardware – dramatically accelerating software development times and reducing hardware costs. Virtual appliance configuration, deployment and debugging will be integrated with the SpringSource Tool Suite, and ready-to-use virtual images will be provided for dm Server, tc Server and Apache Tomcat.

The first SpringSource/VMware commercial offerings are scheduled for availability in January 2009.

Tideway Releases Foundation 7.2

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Tideway today announced the availability of Tideway Foundation 7.2. The latest version of Tideway’s automated discovery and application dependency mapping software aggregates critical hardware reference and software end-of-life data traditionally spread across multiple vendors and asset management systems. The new features give organizations a single platform from which to analyze power consumption statistics for business applications, view their carbon footprint, and ensure end-of-life, unsupported software is not being used in production applications.

Foundation 7.2 also delivers enhanced capabilities to track end-of-life dates to manage data center software through the entire lifecycle, from introduction to retirement, and reduce the support costs and business risks for aging software. It combines automatically discovered data about software versions in the environment with known end-of-life information from vendors to track software aging on an ongoing basis. Users can ensure standardization and compliance and avoid costly fees by having end-of-life, end-of-support and end-of-extended-support information easily accessible and mapped to precisely where the software exists in the data center.

Both the expanded hardware reference data and end-of-life tracking in Foundation 7.2 are powered by Tideway’s Knowledge Update Service (TKU), a continuously updated, community-directed library of configuration information that catalogs software and hardware assets and business applications running in data centers.

Additionally, Foundation 7.2 includes new dynamic discovery extensions that enhance the flexibility of the platform. Users can build custom extensions to Foundation independent of Tideway product release cycles to address their own unique IT environment. Foundation 7.2 ships with a pre-built extension for database discovery. This extension identifies the structures and data within any JDBC-supported database, understands dependencies on specific database tables, and dynamically references non-discoverable data held in database tables, such as physical locations or ownership.

Tideway Foundation 7.2 will be generally available in January, 2009.

Beta Release: Virtual Computer NxTop

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“We are celebrating a major milestone at Virtual Computer this week, as we now have our first NxTop beta customer up and running.”

Those are the first words of the blog post announcing the first NxTop beta integration from Virtual Computer, a startup that was in stealth mode until they launched last August.

You can register for the beta program here if you would like to learn more.