Virtualization.com

Extreme Networks today announced highly scalable 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network solutions.

The VIM3-40G4X adds four 40 GbE connections to the Summit X650 Top-of-Rack stackable switches for $3,995, or less than $1,000 per port.

The new module is fully compatible with the existing Summit X650 and Summit X480 stackable switches, preserving customers’ investments while providing a smooth upgrade to greatly increased scalability of both virtualized and non-virtualized data centers.

At Interop Las Vegas, Extreme Networks is demonstrating the VIM3-40G4X installed in a Summit X650 stackable switch in a “Top-of-Rack” configuration connected to the BlackDiamond 8800 chassis with a four port 40 GbE module configured as the Data Center core. All of the industry-leading features of the ExtremeXOS modular operating system, including Layer 2/Layer 3 forwarding, redundancy and resiliency features such as EAPS, and the ability to bond together multiple links, are implemented at 40 GbE speeds.

Extreme Networks recent announcement of its XNV VM Lifecycle Management and the Direct Attach network virtualization architecture, named a Best of Interop Finalist in the virtualization category, are fully supported with 40 GbE at their release.

40 GbE is poised to become a data center infrastructure requirement, where it serves as an aggregation technology necessary to build data centers with high performance servers that are supporting virtualized services, video, storage and traditional applications.

Pricing and Availability: Extreme Networks VIM3-40G4X for the Summit X650 series switch will be in customer trial in the third quarter of 2010 and customer shipment follows at the U.S. list price of $3,995.

NComputing, provider of low-cost virtual desktops for Windows, Linux, VMware and Citrix, with over 20 million daily users, today announced the launch and immediate availability of the L300 access device based on the NComputing Numo family chip, a highly integrated and multimedia enhancing System-on-Chip (SoC).

The L300, in combination with NComputing vSpace virtualization software delivers Windows virtual desktops and integrates seamlessly into Citrix and VMware VDI installations.

The L300 Ethernet virtual desktop builds on the success of the L series product line by delivering rich, full screen, full motion multimedia playback up to 1920×1080 resolution, transparent USB redirection, and simple but powerful deployment and management tools, making setup easy to deploy 4 workstations in a remote branch office or four thousand in a corporate office.

The L300, in combination with NComputing vSpace virtualization software provides the high-quality virtual desktops that have already seen rapid adoption with more than 600,000 commercial deployments. The L300 zero client costs less than any other thin or zero client option in the marketplace and a quarter of the cost of desktop PCs. In combination with the NComputing vSpace Software, the L300 enables VDI solutions at one third the price of other offerings.

F5 Networks today announced new Application Delivery Controller platforms, extending its BIG-IP product family.

F5 is offering a new high-end appliance series with the BIG-IP 11050 platform and a new 8950 hardware appliance featuring higher throughput and enhanced layer 4 performance. In addition, F5 is delivering production and lab versions of its virtual appliance, BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Virtual Edition (VE). Together, F5’s physical and virtual ADC solutions provide enterprises and service providers with greater flexibility, offering a hybrid approach to architecting an adaptable and highly scalable application delivery network.

The addition of these new hardware platforms and BIG-IP LTM VE improves F5’s ability to provide the foundations of a flexible ADN architecture and support the company’s vision for enterprise cloud architecture. With these agile infrastructure components, organizations can implement a framework to deliver services dynamically as application and network conditions change.

The F5 TMOS architecture means that all BIG-IP appliances—physical and virtual—can leverage the flexible capabilities of the iRules programming language and iControl API, as well as the resources from the company’s DevCentral community. With these powerful, unified technologies, customers can achieve comprehensive visibility and control over their application delivery environments.

BIG-IP 8950 & 11050 Hardware Helps Customers Meet Growing Throughput Demands

• The new platforms support high throughput levels to meet the application delivery needs of service providers and organizations that put a premium on transactions per second, such as financial institutions. The BIG-IP 8950 platform features a throughput level of 20 Gbps, while the 11050 boasts 42 Gbps.
• The solutions support 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity to help bandwidth-conscious customers deliver enhanced application services. The platforms provide ideal solutions for customers that have configured their data centers around 10GE or are currently planning to upgrade their infrastructure.
• With the 8950 and 11050 platforms, customers have the ability to incorporate additional application services (acceleration, high availability, application security, etc.), as their business needs evolve. Because these capabilities can be added to the existing ADN hardware platform, F5 solutions offer both enhanced functionality and optimum performance.

BIG-IP LTM VE Improves ADC Scalability and Simplifies Solution Deployment

• Virtual ADCs can be rapidly deployed and scaled to support applications as resources are needed. In addition, cloud providers can leverage virtual ADCs to apply specific application policies on a per-customer basis to support individual organizations’ business priorities.
• BIG-IP LTM VE provides improved evaluation, development, integration, QA, and staging for application delivery policies and deployments. By enabling customers to deploy a virtual BIG-IP device in a testing lab, customers can conveniently test how applications and networks will respond in a production environment. This capability also enables customers to evaluate the addition of other ADC services such as SSL offloading, caching, and compression, and seamlessly transfer from testing scenarios into production.
• BIG-IP LTM VE will be available in a full production version and a non-production lab version, as well as the previously announced trial. The full production version features variable throughput options up to 1Gbps. The lab version enables in-depth testing, and is best suited for efforts around application development, test, QA, and other non-production scenarios.
• Unlike other virtualized application delivery offerings, BIG-IP LTM VE is part of a comprehensive application delivery architecture platform. This means that it has been designed to operate in tight integration with F5’s broad product portfolio, as well as support solutions from other leading virtualization companies such as VMware.

The BIG-IP 8950 and 11050 hardware platforms will be available in April. Production and Lab versions of the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) Virtual Edition will also be available in April.

Citrix Systems today reported financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 ended March 31, 2010.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2010, Citrix achieved revenue of $414 million, compared to $369 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2009, representing 12 percent revenue growth.

GAAP Results
Net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 was $47 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, compared to $7 million, or $0.04 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2009.

Non-GAAP Results
Non-GAAP net income in the first quarter of fiscal 2010 was $75 million, or $0.40 per diluted share, compared to $59 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, in the comparable period last year.  Non-GAAP net income for both periods excludes the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expenses and charges recorded in connection with the restructuring program that the company implemented in January 2009 and the tax effects related to those items.

In addition to quarterly financial results, Citrix also announced that its board of directors has authorized it to repurchase up to an additional $400 million of its common stock.  As of March 31, 2010, approximately $58 million remained in authority from previous approvals.

Q1 Financial Summary
In reviewing the first quarter results of 2010, compared to the first quarter of 2009:

• In reviewing the first quarter results of 2010, compared to the first quarter of 2009:
• Product license revenue increased 10 percent;
• Revenue from license updates grew 10 percent;
• Online services revenue grew 18 percent;
• Technical services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, education and technical support, grew 18 percent;
• Revenue increased in the America’s region by 14 percent; increased in the EMEA region by 6 percent; and increased in the Pacific region by 13 percent;
• Deferred revenue totaled $636 million, compared to $535 million on March 31, 2009;
• GAAP operating margin was 13 percent for the quarter, compared to one percent in the first quarter of 2009, and non-GAAP operating margin was 23 percent for the quarter, compared to 19 percent in the first quarter of 2009, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, stock-based compensation expense and costs associated with the 2009 restructuring program;
• Cash flow from operations was $144 million, compared with $82 million in the first quarter of 2009; and
• The company repurchased 2.3 million shares at an average price of $43.71.

Financial Outlook for Second Quarter 2010
Citrix management expects to achieve the following results during its second fiscal quarter of 2010 ending June 30, 2010:

• Net revenue is expected to be in the range of $430 million to $440 million;
• Interest income is expected to be $3 million to $4 million;
• Weighted average shares outstanding is expected to be in the range of 190 million to 192 million shares; and
• GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.28 to $0.29. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.44 to $0.45, excluding $0.08 related to the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, $0.14 related to the effects of stock-based compensation expenses, certain charges recorded in conjunction with the company’s 2009 restructuring program, if any, and, $(0.05) to $(0.07) for the effect of the differential between the GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates and tax effects related to these items.

The above statements are based on current expectations. These statements are forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially.

Financial Outlook for Fiscal Year 2010
Citrix management expects to achieve the following results during its fiscal year 2010 ending December 31, 2010:

• Net revenue is expected to be in the range of $1.765 billion to $1.78 billion;
• Non-GAAP operating margin is expected to increase by 100 basis points compared to fiscal year 2009, excluding the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations and stock-based compensation expense, and certain charges recorded in conjunction with the company’s 2009 restructuring program;
• Interest income is expected to be $16 million to $19 million; and
• GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $1.29 to $1.34. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $1.88 to $1.91, excluding $0.33 related to the effects of amortization of intangible assets primarily related to business combinations, $0.52 related to the effects of stock-based compensation expenses, certain charges recorded in conjunction with the company’s 2009 restructuring program and $(0.23) to $(0.30) for the effect of the differential between the GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates and tax effects related to these items.

The above statements are based on current expectations. These statements are forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially.

Company, Product and Alliance Highlights
During the first quarter of 2010, Citrix announced:

• The Feature Pack 1 release of Citrix XenDesktop 4, which sets new scalability records, simplifies management, and lets end user access virtual desktops up to five times faster – all in order to accelerate the adoption of desktop virtualization.
• Citrix XenDesktop 4 was honored as an InfoWorld 2010 Technology of the Year Award winner, selected by editors and reviewers as one of the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape.
• The release of Citrix XenApp 6, with major enhancements to the de facto standard for on-demand application delivery that simplifies management, enhances scalability, and expands high-definition support and self-service access to apps from any device, including PCs, Macs, laptops and smart phones.
• A new high-performance appliance in its Citrix NetScaler MPX family of application networking systems to round out a comprehensive and cost-effective product line that spans small, single application virtual appliances to massive, high-end systems designed to power the world’s busiest websites with unmatched scalability.
• A joint collaboration agreement with Microsoft to accelerate virtual desktop adoption.  The agreement includes the “VDI Kick Start” promotion, which offers new customers a more than 50 percent discount off the estimated retail price and the “Rescue for VMware VDI” promotion, which allows VMware customers to trade in up to 500 View licenses at no additional cost in order to “jump start” a complete VDI solution.  Additionally, the companies will work together to enable the high-definition HDX technology in Citrix XenDesktop to enhance and extend the capabilities of the Microsoft RemoteFX platform, ensuring that virtual desktops are a rich, high-definition experience for all users, regardless of their device, location or role.

In today’s dynamic data center, virtual elements and relationships are in a constant state of flux, making it difficult to capture and rationalize management data into actionable business insights.

To address this problem, Hyper9, the enterprise-class virtualization management company, today announced the latest release of its Virtual Environment Optimization (VEO) solution to give organizations better line of sight into the virtual infrastructure and how critical capacity and performance issues impact business operations.

Hyper9 VEO combines physical, virtual and logical management capabilities that bridge the gap between disparate technology domains and disciplines, and provide better understanding, forecasting and management of virtual environment operations. New features in this latest release include:

• Personalized widget-based dashboards – provide integrated alerting, trending, capacity planning; offer drag and drop customization such as by discipline and role.
• Application-aware capacity/performance visualization – projects when resources will run out (CPU, memory, shared storage), how many more workloads can be added, shortage forecasts and performance hot spots.
• Storage I/O analysis – gives visibility into storage bottlenecks; provides detailed storage metrics such as latency, throughput, IOPS (input/output operations per second) across all storage types including FC, iSCSI and NFS.
• Application service support – provides application tagging and dependency mapping to the virtual infrastructure, impact analysis and service modeling.

Hyper9’s discovery-based technology platform has been proven to deliver near-immediate ROI, helping organizations transition IT from a cost center to a value center. Recent examples include:

• A Fortune 500 electronic company had no way to track VM ownership or determine stale virtual machines – a precursor to VM sprawl. Hyper9 determined that 13 percent of several thousand virtual machines were not being used, enabling the company to delay purchase of eight 8-processor host servers for at total of $272,000 in savings.
• A Fortune 500 retail chain faced significant challenges tracking abandoned VM snapshots that were consuming storage. In less than an hour, Hyper9 identified 12 Terabytes of orphaned files, resulting in $180,000 of reclaimable space.

Novell today announced IBM is delivering a portfolio of software appliances across IBM brands, all powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Leveraging the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell, this broad-based initiative enables IBM to deliver “plug and play” appliances that substantially lower the cost and complexity of deploying applications for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and help independent software vendors (ISVs) significantly expand their routes to market.

With just a few mouse clicks, IBM customers and partners can now quickly and easily deploy customized and fully-tested software appliances to physical, virtual or cloud environments, and IBM is offering virtual stacks on the IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.

Software appliances are pre-configured combinations of an application, middleware and operating system integrated into a single image and tailored to run on industry-standard hardware. Using software appliances ISVs can simplify the packaging of their solutions for multiple environments, allowing them to test, deploy and scale their offerings to their customers’ specific needs. This offers unprecedented opportunities to deliver simplified, highly-portable, tailored solutions free of the maintenance headaches that have often plagued enterprise IT. In effect, appliances make it possible to “mass customize” application delivery and furnish a fully-integrated solution faster and more efficiently than before.

The combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM software represents a significant step forward in providing affordable, reliable, easy-to-use software appliances. IBM has created appliances based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in the following areas:

• IBM Lotus Foundations – A complete technology and collaboration solution for small and medium-sized businesses. Using software appliances provides faster access and adoption of solutions, from accounting packages to a local network infrastructure.
• IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Security – Protects IBM Lotus® Domino® and mixed email infrastructure from spam, viruses and other threats originating on the Internet. Using software appliances means protection can be installed and running in a matter of hours.
• IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition– Offers all of the robust features of the WebSphere Application Server Family for virtual environments. By configuring and packaging as an appliance with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, customers can activate an optimized instance of WebSphere quickly and efficiently.
• IBM Cognos Now! – Delivers operational dashboards for real-time monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics across disparate data sources.
• IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer – Enables a new class of high-speed business intelligence and analytic queries.