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Countdown For The Business Technology Summit (India)

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The power team for Workhorse IT – SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, Virtualization and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) – will be center stage at Saltmarch Media‘s Business Technology Summit, for which Virtualization.com is proud to be one of the media sponsors.

The premier annual gathering for business technology stakeholders from across the world, the 2008 edition of Business Technology Summit will be held September 22-26 in Bangalore and Mumbai. (Also make sure you check out our Events page)

Expected to attend the four day conference and expo will be nearly 800 decision makers, analysts, product managers, architects, engineers, project managers, designers, developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, VC, marketers and business strategists – who are embracing the opportunities created by these mature and workhorse enterprise technologies. The attendee spectrum will also encompass the IT Channel – Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Value Added Resellers (VARs), System Integrators (SIs), and Distributors.

Centered around the theme of “Riding the Workhorse IT Hockey Stick”, BT Summit features four co-located tracks — SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, that offer complimentary synergistic for a robust IT infrastructure that no IT decision-maker, manager, architect or professional can afford to ignore in their quest for business technology success. Attendees to the summit will be able to attend talks from all four tracks.

Speakers, handpicked by the BT Summit chair, include Alan Pelz-Sharpe (ECM Analyst), Chris Harding (SOA Visionary), Peter Coffee (SaaS/PaaS Expert), Ismael Ghalimi (BPM Pioneer) Robert Marcus (Grid Visionary), Matjaz B. Juric (BPEL Mentor) Ravi Gururaj (Founder, VMLogix), Morris Panner (SaaS Workflow Expert) Sasa Ana (SOA Researcher) Nitin Borwankar (Father of Data 2.0), Hans de Groot (Web Globalization Expert).

In addition to keynotes, power panels, focussed sessions, and hands-on workshops over four days, one of the best reasons to attend BT Summit is the vibrant exhibition, which features leading business technology companies and their projects and services. Intalio, SDL Tridion, Progress Software and OpenAir among others are sponsors at the summit. Business Technology Summit sponsorship information is available here.

CohesiveFT Adds Elastic Server Support for Amazon EC2

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Tomorrow, CohesiveFT, makers of the Elastic Server platform, will announce support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) large, extra-large and high-CPU instances.

This is an expansion beyond the company’s existing support for standard instances on Amazon EC2’s 32-bit platform. Developers interested in defining software components for real-time deployment to Amazon EC2 can use the Elastic Server platform to build, test and deploy their Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats.

The Elastic Server platform lets users choose their components from a library of popular software stacks. The platform also allows any individual, team or company to import their software offerings, a crowd-sourced practice that ensures the library continually reflects evolving market preferences. Once assembled, these custom application stacks can be configured to a variety of virtualization and cloud-ready formats, downloaded and deployed in real-time. Support for the full spectrum of Amazon EC2 formats follows the company’s recent support for the Flexiscale cloud environment, the Skytap Virtual Lab, as well as its ongoing support for the VMware, Parallels, and Xen formats.

The Elastic Server platform features a dashboard that highlights the most popular user-selected components as well as an overall view of community activity. Users can also distribute their finished servers through the Elastic Server platform. There are currently more than a thousand community users contributing nearly three thousand Elastic Servers to the market.

Cohesive Flexible Technologies

Citrix Releases XenApp 5, Will It Prove To Become The Application Virtualization Standard?

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Remember when Brian Madden pointed out that Citrix XenApp 5.0 would be delayed for several months? Well, he was right, technically. Anyhow, Citrix today announced the release of Citrix XenApp 5, and claims it “breaks through performance and operating-cost barriers, making application start times up to 10 times faster, dramatically improving end-user experience and lowering application management costs by more than 25 percent over previous versions”.

“XenApp 5 broadens the horizon of the end-user experience and accessibility by delivering an end-to-end virtualization solution that addresses the needs of both local and hosted applications,” said Mark Bowker, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “In addition, XenApp 5 is giving new and existing customers a welcome boost in performance at an attractive price-point, two highly sought-after requirements for companies investing in strategic technologies in today’s economy.”

XenApp, in combination with Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer, creates an end-to-end virtualization solution that spans servers, applications and desktops. The new XenApp 5 release is being featured on September 9, 2008 as part of a global, online launch event, called Citrix Delivery Center Live!

With the release of XenApp 5, Citrix claims it is raising the bar with significant new improvements to performance, user experience and cost savings. In total, XenApp 5 includes more than 50 new major enhancements, according to the official press release.

XenApp 5, which runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform, leverages all the enhancements in Windows Server 2008 and fully supports Windows Server 2003. This enables existing Windows Server 2003 customers to immediately deploy Windows Server 2008 into their existing XenApp environments in any mix.

XenApp 5 will be available September 10, 2008. For North America, suggested retail pricing is per concurrent user (CCU) and includes one year of Subscription Advantage:

  • Advanced Edition – US $350
  • Enterprise Edition – US $450
  • Platinum Edition – US $600

Standalone pricing for client-side application streaming and virtualization begins as low as $60 per CCU.

Citrix Systems

StoneFly IP SAN Configurations Now Fit For Citrix XenServer

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StoneFly, a supplier of integrated IP storage area network (SAN) systems and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, today announced that all of its IP SAN configurations have completed Citrix Ready compatibility verification testing for use with server virtualization solutions from Citrix Systems.

StoneFly’s High-Availability Storage Concentrator (HSC), Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) and OptiSAN Storage Concentrator product lines have been optimized for Citrix XenServer server solutions, which are designed for virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter.

The compatibility bolsters StoneFly’s existing support for fast integration of networked storage with virtual servers – available via StoneFusion, the company’s IP-based, block-level provisioning platform. StoneFly pioneered storage virtualization over five years ago with StoneFusion, which centralizes storage management, control and monitoring of logical storage volumes.
XenServer compatibility allows StoneFly to further simplify IP SAN deployment for its customers: StoneFly’s support for network boot technologies (both software and hardware initiator based) in diskless virtual server environments saves IT administration time, and streamlines operations. Customers can also reduce datacenter costs and consolidate resources by using IP SANs to facilitate the use of diskless servers and virtual servers.
StoneFly is planning further enhancements over the coming months to its integration with Xen environments to build upon the seamless storage/server experience that it is providing to customers.

PHD Technologies Officially Announces Funding Round, Fails To Share Any Details

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Remember last week when we reported on PHD Technologies, provider of the esXPRESS backup and restoration solution for virtualized infrastructures, announcing the appointment of Sridhar Murthy as the company’s CEO?

The press release also mentioned a fresh funding round, but was scarce on details. Today, the company decided to let us in on the questions we all ask when a new investment in a virtualization company is made: who decided to invest, and how much?

Except you won’t find any answers in their newest official press release either, except for the fact that it concerns “an equity investment from a top tier venture capital firm”. The rest of the press release was the usual marketingese, but I really wondered why PHD Technologies decided it was worth sending a press release containing absolutely no new information whatsoever?

Xen 3.3.0 Available For Download

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A recent post on the Xen blog featured a proposed data sheet (PDF) for the (back then upcoming) Xen 3.3 release, which we said was in final testing stage in the beginning of this month. Now Xen 3.3.0 is here and ready for download, as reported by Heise Online.

The new version is also available as part of a package with a 2.6.18 kernel version of Linux as the host system, also known as Domain 0 (Dom0). According to Xen developers, the number of supported guest operating systems has grown and there are improvements in performance, the ACPI power management modes, and security functions such as using PVGrub instead of PYGrub. Xen 3.3.0 also has fewer limitations on moving running virtual machines from one physical system to another. This function, necessary for redundant fail over configurations and practical for server maintenance, has previously only been usable when the processors (and chipsets) running on the physical machines involved supported very similar hardware virtualization functions.