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

Kaseya Announces Upgraded Backup / Disaster Recovery And Endpoint Security Modules

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Kaseya announced today the release of two new versions of its popular Kaseya Endpoint Security (KES) and Backup and Disaster Recovery (BU-DR) modules. The new releases offer significant automation capabilities for fast deployment and efficient utilization of IT resources.

The endpoint security module provides integration for unified deployment and management of anti-virus, anti-spyware and rootkit protection for Microsoft OS-based servers, workstations and mobile computers. KES is integrated at both the user interface and database levels with Kaseya’s complete suite of IT automation software, providing for seamless operation and eliminating complexity.
This allows users to automate IT management and have full visibility of all deployment, configuration, status and operations of endpoint security, all within Kaseya’s unified and consistent Web-based console.
The new backup and disaster recovery functionality now includes Incremental Forever and Synthetic Full Backups for efficient offsite replication and user-defined archival capabilities. In addition, new features for Instant Virtualization allow any backup to be converted to a VMware, ESX or Virtual PC virtual disk remotely and automatically within minutes. This is an enormous time-saver that significantly eases the restoration process. With just a few clicks, customers can instantly have a key system up and running in a virtual environment. This makes it possible to recover files and folders in real time to an existing machine, to a “bare metal” machine, or to a virtual machine.

Kaseya Endpoint Security 2.0 and Backup and Disaster Recovery 3.0 are available immediately.

Gartner Analysts: Virtualization Will Be Disruptive For Server And Storage Vendors

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This comes from the 27th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, which opened at the MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas: virtualization is proving to be a disruptive trend for server and storage vendors, according to Gartner analysts.

“Virtualization should be seen as not just a tool for (server) consolidation, but as a modernization catalyst,” said Thomas Bittman, a Gartner VP and Chief of Research for its Infrastructure and operations area. “It’s changing how we deal with the business.”

As DataCenterKnowledge points out, Bittman foresees the emergence of a “meta operating system” – a virtualization layer between applications and distributed computing resources that will play a central role in the next-generation data center.

[Read more…] about Gartner Analysts: Virtualization Will Be Disruptive For Server And Storage Vendors

VMware Releases VMware View 3 For Virtual Desktop Environments

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VMware today announced the general availability of VMware View 3. With VMware View 3, IT organizations can “decouple” a desktop from specific physical devices or locations to create a personalized view of a user’s desktop, applications, and data – called “myView” – that is securely accessible from almost any device, at any time. By hosting these virtual desktop images in the datacenter using the industry-leading virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware View 3 enables IT personnel to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops simply, securely, and with substantially lower operating costs.

VMware View 3 is a major step in VMware’s vClient Initiative, announced at VMworld 2008 in September, to solve the “desktop dilemma.” As described by VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz, the desktop dilemma is the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. Thick clients, or fully loaded PCs, give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment, but are a management nightmare because applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually.

Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call center staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment. VMware View 3 solves this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches – delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter.

VMware View 3 is a family of products available in two editions:

  • VMware View 3, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition and VMware View Manager 3, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access.
  • VMware View 3, Premier Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp for agentless application virtualization and VMware View Composer, a new product that enables IT staff to create multiple virtual desktops from a single image, increasing the speed of provisioning desktops and reducing storage requirements.

With the following new products and technologies, VMware View 3 is the only enterprise-class solution that delivers simple, end-to-end management of virtual desktops and virtual applications from the datacenter to the client:

  • VMware View Composer is a new product that uses Linked Clone technology to create virtual desktops rapidly from a master image while consuming up to 70 percent less storage space. Automated image preparation and provisioning take only seconds and are centrally controlled by View Manager. In addition, View Composer can reduce management costs by enabling IT to update thousands of individual virtual desktops by simply updating the master image with a patch or application update and then applying the changes to each desktop cloned from the master image. View Composer provides this one-to-many image updating while preserving user data, settings, and preferences so patching is seamless to end users.
  • VMware ThinApp is bundled with VMware View 3 to enable simplified application packaging and deployment to a virtual desktop environment. ThinApp and View Composer work together to provide streamlined virtual desktop image creation and updating. ThinApp enables applications to run independently of the host operating system version or patch level. This simplifies updating and patching applications, and provides additional storage reduction for virtual desktops by centralizing and compressing applications. ThinApp’s unique architecture does not require an agent on the user’s desktop, a major advantage compared to other techniques for virtualization applications.
  • Offline Desktop, an experimental feature, provides the flexibility to intelligently and securely move virtual desktops between the datacenter and a local laptop or desktop, increasing user productivity while providing secure mobility. Users can “check out” a virtual desktop onto an ordinary PC, such as a laptop, run the virtual desktop locally and then check it back in to the datacenter. Offline Desktop allows a user to keep using his virtual desktop when no network is available, or simply to take advantage of local resources for the best virtual desktop user experience available.
  • Unified Access, a new feature of VMware View Manager 3, provides desktop administrators with a single management platform for multiple types of sessions. VMware View Manager 3 connects to desktop environments hosted on VMware Infrastructure, or user sessions running on Windows Terminal Servers or even physical PCs such as a blade PC. Individuals have a single point of access to seamlessly connect to their desktop environment, while administrators have a single point of administration.
  • Virtual Printing provides end users the ability to print to any local or network printer without installing specific printer drivers. Virtual Printing technology provides compression for print jobs and auto detection of local printers from the client. This eliminates printer driver issues and the need for printer configuration. End users get high quality printing with enhanced performance across the WAN.
  • Multimedia Redirection improves the user experience with rich multimedia playback capabilities. The multimedia processing tasks are intelligently redirected from the server to the end user device where the multimedia stream is decoded, taking advantage of the local processing power.

VMware View 3 is available immediately through VMware sales and the company’s extensive network of OEM partners and more than 20,000 channel partners. VMware View 3 Enterprise Edition is priced at $150 per concurrent connection and the VMware View 3 Premier Edition is priced at $250 per concurrent connection.

Fujitsu Releases Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition

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Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced the North American availability of Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition (RCVE), software that provides enterprise data centers and cloud computing providers with improved management control, rapid reconfiguration capabilities, and fully automated failover for both physical and virtualized blade servers.

Key features include:
— Recovery for high availability – RCVE is more affordable than clustering – enterprises can choose the same lower cost, highly available, highly reliable Fujitsu PRIMERGY(R) blade servers for use in their physical and virtual environments. A single spare can be shared between the two, with RCVE working in concert with VMWare’s VMotion(TM).
— Uniform interface – The single management view of physical and virtual environments simplifies system administration and reduces the number of errors; hierarchical system views help pinpoint hardware problems, enabling faster recovery and minimizing service disruptions.
— I/O virtualization – Leveraging embedded virtualization features in Fujitsu PRIMERGY blades, the software automates SAN reconfiguration when switching over servers, solving a common virtualization recovery complaint. The feature works with nearly all market-leading SAN storage systems.
— Fast provisioning – New blades can be added or recovered faster and automatically, increasing hardware availability and service levels while lowering administration costs.
— Backup and restore capabilities – RCVE increases ease of back-up and recovery for both virtualized and native environments through unified views and storage of three “golden image” versions.
The Fujitsu RCVE software is available now. Pricing starts at $7,600 per PRIMERGY chassis, including management software and agent software for either Windows or Linux blades.

Neptuny Releases Caplan 3.0, Capacity Management Solution

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Neptuny today launched Caplan 3.0, a business-aware Capacity Management solution for large data centres and networks. The new version of Caplan facilitates successful implementation of virtualization and consolidation initiatives as well as the production of future scenarios to enable the alignment between IT resources and business initiatives.

Rationalizing IT resources while still being able to support the business is imperative for all corporations. Also, with a slumping economy it becomes even more important to optimize the use of resources and to reduce operating and capital costs. The new version of Caplan 3.0 reduces overcapacity by its ability to determine the amount of capacity required at any given time leading to a more cost effective and greener IT department. Caplan 3.0 can also predict capacity shortages, thereby reducing the likelihood of any performance or capacity-related incidents as well as ensuring that the minimum capacity required to keep the business running is available in the event of any IT failure.

Caplan™3.0 can be leveraged for virtualized environments as well. The latest release of Caplan v3.0 now supports several virtualization technologies including VMware ESX Server, AIX Micro partitions, HP nPartition/vPartition, Solaris Dynamic System Domains, and MS Virtual Server 2005. For all these technologies, Caplan has the ability to identify systems to be consolidated and to safely perform consolidation and virtualization initiatives as it can simulate both physical consolidation and virtualization. Once initiatives have been undertaken Caplan will automatically monitor the infrastructure behaviour to notify whether its behaviour does not differ from detected baseline. Therefore, Caplan™can help customers to reduce risks involved in overloading the virtualized infrastructure in their data centres.

Additionally, Caplan 3.0 provides specific features enabling Capacity Management to be easily integrated with ITSM tools and workflow platforms, thus allowing external third-party application to leverage Caplan services (via SOAP Web Services and HTTP/XML calls) and to asynchronously push data into Caplan Capacity Database (via J2EE JMS Messages). This allows Caplan to promote an improved IT culture through the introduction of a structured capacity management process that complies with ITIL v3 best practices regarding Capacity Management.

HP Takes Next Step To Support Future Growth

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HP today outlined the results of its three-year IT transformation and laid out the company’s IT strategy to support future growth for fiscal year 2009 and beyond.

As a result of the effort, HP has reduced its IT operating costs by approximately half; provided more reliable information for executives to make better business decisions; and, established a more simplified and dependable IT infrastructure that provides improved business continuity and supports the company’s future growth.

The initiative began shortly after Mott joined HP in July 2005. Starting in fiscal year 2009, the transformation will lower IT costs by more than $1 billion per year from fiscal year 2005 levels. This cost reduction is even more impressive considering HP added more than $25 billion in revenue during the three years since the transformation began.

The transformation focused on five major initiatives: next-generation global data centers, portfolio management, workforce effectiveness, building a world-class technology organization and a true enterprise data warehouse. Through aligning its entire global organization on these five initiatives, HP has reduced complexity and added significant capability and quality of service.

The HP IT organization now operates under a strategic framework in which teams are deployed to deliver more business innovation through a smaller number of global and common applications. These applications are running in the next-generation data centers, where the technology is constantly refreshed in modular-designed white space.

By creating global and common applications, HP IT is able to focus on new capabilities and devote 80 percent of IT employees to innovation that is aligned with business strategies and future growth opportunities.