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

VirtualLogix Hooks Up With Freescale Semiconductor To Secure Mobile Commerce

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VirtualLogix today announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Freescale Semiconductor to create a trusted environment for mobile devices and other terminals that can be used in particular to ensure security of mobile commerce (m-commerce) transactions.

VirtualLogix VLX for Mobile Handsets virtualization technology will be incorporated into the Freescale Semiconductor i.MX31 multimedia applications processor to create an isolated Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), independent of the main application open operating system (open OS), which protects mobile devices from m-commerce security threats.

By adding VLX realtime virtualization on the i.MX31 applications processor, the open OS is securely isolated from a closed TEE where m-commerce transactions safely occur on the mobile phone or device. These measures protect against m-commerce security threats such as keystroke logging and phishing attacks.

Tresys Ships VM Fortress, Aims To Meet High End Desktop Virtualization Security Needs

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Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and services for customers with high security requirements, today announced (PDF) the availability of Tresys VM Fortress, a patent-pending secure desktop virtualization technology for organizations seeking strong security and operational integrity.

VM Fortress (not to be confused with vFortress, a company recently acquired by Propalms), aims to give organizations with high-end security needs the ability to utilize desktop virtualization without compromising protection by strengthening the guest operations system and the virtualization software itself to withstand the most threatening of compromises.

According to the press release, VM Fortress benefits and market differentiators include:

  • Strong Endpoint Security: Providing strong, independent control over system resources by leveraging the flexible mandatory access control (MAC) features provided by Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to limit damage caused by exploitable vulnerabilities in virtual machines
  • Decreased Operational Costs: Removing the barrier of entry to desktop consolidation where security assurance is a high priority; leveraging stronger MAC security reduces the damage and costs to desktop environments should they become attacked
  • Increased Data Confidentiality & Integrity: Providing separation for the user and the application on a per VM basis, ensuring that data is not leaked across VMs and that applications cannot interfere with each other while sharing the same hardware resources
  • Increased Operational Integrity: Limiting the effects of attacks and errors, so that vulnerabilities in one VM cannot be exploited to gain access to other VMs or to the host operating system
  • Ease of Management/Deployment: Systems can be deployed over the network from a central installation server and VMs can be remotely downloaded on demand by the user

Lanamark Launches With Powerful Capacity Planning Software Suite

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Lanamark, a provider of software solutions for accelerating virtualization services delivery, today announced limited availability of its flagship software solution Lanamark Suite. The company, a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Canada, also announced a Lanamark Early Access Program (LEAP) for VARs, consultants and system integrators.

Lanamark Suite consists of software applications for discovering, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It allows Lanamark channel partners to deliver virtualization services quickly and consistently across multiple hypervisors, protect customer data captured for analysis and differentiate their offerings by providing customers with “unique, sophisticated and unbiased service deliverables”.

“Lanamark Suite enables service providers to deliver hypervisor-agnostic virtualization services that help their customers accelerate adoption of virtualized environments,” said Mark Angelo, CEO and founder of Lanamark. “Today’s solutions are not designed for services delivery – they are challenging and time-consuming to deploy, use and license. Furthermore, these solutions are very intrusive to customer environments and do not adequately secure and protect customer data. Our software is designed from the ground up to address these challenges and remove non-value-add activities. We enable our channel partners to focus on areas where they can leverage their extensive knowledge of IT infrastructure and add the most value for customers – analysis, design and optimization of virtualized and physical infrastructure.”

Angelo comes from PlateSpin, where he was Product Line Manager for PowerRecon, and recently from VMLogix, where he was Director of Business Development.

Lanamark Suite consists of:

  • Lanamark Portal – for managing customer accounts, engagements and assessments online. Using the Lanamark Portal, service providers can also administer teams of consultants and acquire individual licenses for workload analysis in Lanamark Studio.
  • Lanamark Explorer – for truly agent-less collection of inventory and performance data about application workloads and server resources. Lanamark Explorer is a light-weight and easy-to-install application that does not require licenses upfront. The data it captures is stored in a secure snapshot that can only be unlocked by the service provider performing the assessment.
  • Lanamark Studio – for rich analysis and reporting on application workloads and server resources. Using templates, consultants can identify virtualization candidates and automatically publish powerful charts and reports that map directly onto assessment deliverables, consistently across engagements.

Neocleus Raises $11,4 M in Series B Funding

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Neocleus, a startup yet to release a product who recently unveiled its ‘endpoint virtualization’ strategy, seems to have been convincing enough in validating its approach to investors. The company has raised $11.4M in Series B funding (PDF) in a round led by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds, its original investors.

Neocleus applies virtualization to desktops and laptops delivering the flexibility, manageability and security needed to address different user scenarios within a dynamic, dispersed enterprise. The company’s solutions, which include a Xen-based open source Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor for endpoints, aim to enable critical IT tasks to operate in isolated, trusted virtual environments with complete access to the capabilities offered by the underlying endpoint hardware.

Neocleus was founded in 2006 by industry veterans Ariel Gorfung (CEO) and Etay Bogner (CTO) and launched last May with the announcement of the Desktop Hypervisor Framework, an endpoint hypervisor enhancement to the Xen server hypervisor that the company will be contributing to the open source community.

Most recently Neocleus announced Trusted Edge, the first in a suite of virtual software appliances that allows for secure access to corporate resources – for employees, customers and partners – regardless of the endpoint’s location or state of security.

openQRM 4.0 (Beta), Going Strong

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Matt Rechenburg has just announced the beta version of openQRM 4.0.

Not even that long after Qlusters decided to set the project free, the openQRM team has changed directions in a way Qlusters never would have allowed.

openQRM 4.0 is a major rewrite of the openQRM functionality in PHP. The openQRM team has been listening to the community and learned that contributions will be much easier if the tool would be rewritten in a scripting-based language. They decided to keep the platform as simple as possible.

Plugin support now is a lot easier, rather than having to reconfigure and enable plugins from the command line, one can now enable plugins from the webGUI (similar to the Drupal modules)

The old openQRM provided a lot of proprietary libraries and tools that were already available on a typical Linux distribution. From now on, openQRM will use the tools available from the distribution.

The goal of openQRM hasn’t changed , the focus of the project is still on on rapid-, appliance-based deployment, virtualization and storage management.

Still no news from the Qlusters side however, and their site obviously needs an update.

CiRBA Releases Version 5.0 of Its Virtualization Analysis Platform

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CiRBA, provider of Data Center Intelligence software, today announced the release of Version 5.0 of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. With Version 5.0, CiRBA aims to enable organizations to build dynamic models of their virtual and physical infrastructure to continually identify opportunities to improve performance, optimize VM placements, and minimize operational risk.

CiRBA

“Version 5.0 underscores the fact that all the details that go into planning virtualized infrastructure must also be factored in on a daily basis when managing virtual environments,” said Andrew Hillier, CIRBA CTO and Co-Founder. “All business-level constraints, technical compatibilities, workload personalities, and risk tolerances need to be respected every time an environment undergoes changes. And because virtual environments are constantly changing, CiRBA’s latest release provides the dynamic analysis needed to bring all of this together to optimize utilization and minimize operational risk, while at the same time keeping an eye on minimizing power consumption and maximizing financial returns.”

Using CIRBA Version 5.0, organizations build unique dynamic models of existing IT environments. These models provide a consolidated view of the critical business, technical, configuration, and workload data typically stored in disparate systems. Pre-packaged and customizable analysis templates are applied to these models in order to provide the intelligence required to transform an environment and continually assess the impact of change within virtualized infrastructure.

Because the analysis is rule-driven, the options for analysis are virtually unlimited and are generally categorized according to the type of transformation being considered such as P2P, P2V or V2V, or by the requirements of an individual’s role or focus, such as capacity planning, risk management or compliance reporting.

CiRBA Version 5.0 also introduces integrated financial analysis by enabling the results of an analysis to be directly inserted into any Excel-based financial model. CiRBA 5.0 includes a default model that provides a comprehensive TCO/ROI calculation, factoring in both capital and operational savings, applying hardware, power, facilities and staff costs to analysis results to determine the true financial profile of each strategy being considered.