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Red Hat Introduces Cloud Infrastructure Solutions

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Red Hat has announced new offerings, ecosystem infrastructure and services designed to provide CIOs with a comprehensive, easy on-ramp to cloud computing.

The company announces the expansion of development services that provide customers with the tools and expertise needed to deploy and manage cloud environments as well as enhancements to the Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider Program.

Red Hat today announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a major new offering family delivering comprehensive solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds.

Each Red Hat Cloud Foundation offering includes industry-leading products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, expert professional services and training classes – elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds.

With Cloud Foundations, customers can achieve the benefits of the cloud today, with lower risk and simple, easy implementation. These offerings are designed to significantly expand the reach and appeal of cloud, offer the richest set of development and deployment environments in the industry and deliver consistency between the datacenter and public clouds.

The first in this family, Cloud Foundations: Edition One, is available immediately. Cloud Foundations: Edition One enables customers to deploy real private clouds today, and includes:

  • Industry-leading products for implementing a private cloud, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.
  • A cookbook implementation guide, making cloud setup quick and simple.
  • A detailed reference architecture providing step-by-step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring the private cloud. The reference architecture transfers the years of experience and knowledge Red Hat engineers have built and refined while creating private and public clouds for some of the world’s largest and most demanding companies.
  • Consulting services to enable turnkey assessment, implementation and operational management of a private cloud. Included in the Cloud Foundations services family are Red Hat Cloud Quickstart, which helps customers explore the usage of cloud computing in their infrastructure and develop proof points of cloud viability, and Red Hat Pathway to Cloud Computing, designed for customers ready to start strategic planning and deployment of cloud technologies.
  • Training classes, to transfer knowledge and best practices to customers, creating a strong base of skills among their staff quickly and efficiently.

Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat established the industry’s first program to certify that vendors have validated cloud capabilities and support processes that provide rapid problem resolution. Red Hat today expands the program to include new partners IBM, NTT Communications and Savvis, and introduces new benefits of the program. Red Hat announced the establishment of the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program in June 2009 with its first member, Amazon Web Services.

Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat delivers more industry-leading offerings, including:

  • Cloud-specific Red Hat offerings and pricing designed to make the cloud accessible and attractive to developers, administrators and users.
  • Preconfigured, certified Red Hat images enabled with cloud-specific configuration and security settings to make deployments simple and secure. This includes pre-configured firewall and SELinux settings for secure cloud use the moment an image is started.
  • Innovative management and updating services built for scale and designed to provide maximum security and lower costs, while ensuring consistency between customer datacenter and public cloud environments.
  • Extension of Red Hat partner ISV certification to public clouds, enabling enterprise solution availability and consistency regardless of deployment choices.

Through the program, Certified Cloud Providers can run any supported virtualization solution, ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to VMware and Microsoft platforms. In addition, Premier Certified Cloud Providers are able to deliver Red Hat Cloud Access, an innovative and flexible licensing model that allows customers to easily use existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions in the datacenter or the cloud, thereby driving easy cloud adoption.

Red Hat is also announcing its strategy to enable enterprises and Certified Cloud Providers to deliver industry-leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, opening the cloud to a new range of developers, from large enterprises and the ISVs who serve them, to emerging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.

Red Hat’s PaaS roadmap describes a comprehensive solution that enables users to build and deploy applications within cloud environments while bridging their on-premise application environments. It will be based upon the comprehensive JBoss Enterprise Middleware product line and become part of the Red Hat Cloud Foundations family of solutions.

Red Hat’s strategy is designed to provide a path for the large installed base of Linux, Java and JBoss users, enabling them to easily deploy applications to the cloud, and is also designed to attract new developers, both within traditional ISVs and enterprises, and new ISVs who are creating SaaS solutions from scratch. Red Hat leverages the flexibility of JBoss Open Choice, an application platform approach for supporting virtually any programming model and language. Red Hat PaaS will support Java, Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, as well as many other languages and scripting environments.

Red Hat PaaS solution will also provide tools for easily developing, deploying and managing cloud-based applications. The capabilities will include tools and services for deploying and configuring an application within a cloud environment. It will also include the capabilities for managing the application environment to optimize services and resources.

Red Hat is also introducing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux developer offerings, available exclusively through Red Hat Certified Cloud Providers. These offerings are designed to give SaaS developers the easiest on-ramp to the cloud, and provide a consistent environment for development and deployment. By providing access to a robust, open development platform on certified clouds, Red Hat simplifies the on-ramp for cloud application development and enables more rapid delivery of SaaS solutions based on the leading open source application platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

By providing the full breadth of enterprise-quality capabilities, including virtualization, operating systems, middleware and application frameworks, now backed by the Red Hat Cloud Foundations solution and the expanded Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat is unique in its ability to provide a consistent environment between cloud and on-premise environments.

For more information about Red Hat and cloud computing, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/.

To learn more about this announcement, join Red Hat for a webcast that will be broadcast live from the Red Hat Summit in Boston at 12:30 pm ET on June 23, 2010. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, visit http://www-waa-akam.thomson-webcast.net/us/dispatching/?event_id=20f5425fcb4a6cbb8136d0918bf9e9f2&portal_id=af9b227bf07c733390c2738ee0330646.

F5 Networks Releases New Version of its FirePass SSL VPN Solution

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F5 Networks today announced a new version of its FirePass SSL VPN solution.

With the 7.0 release, FirePass provides enhanced access capabilities, improved IT management through integrated access services with third-party solutions, and flexible deployment options, including an SSL VPN virtual appliance running on VMware vSphere, FirePass Virtual Edition (VE).

FirePass provides browser-based access to organizations’ applications, networks, and data, and employs customizable access policies to ensure all devices accessing corporate information adhere to a company’s specific requirements.

With FirePass, enterprises can manage employee and external access to business applications, keep mobile users connected, and enforce compliance mandates such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. Highlights of the new FirePass version 7.0 include:

  • Flexible Deployment Options, Including a Virtual Appliance

F5 now offers customers the ability to deploy FirePass on both physical and virtual platforms, with FirePass VE delivering all the traditional functionality of its physical counterpart. F5’s virtual deployment options—including the recently announced BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ Virtual Edition—provide a powerful way for organizations to reduce CapEx and OpEx costs by controlling the number of physical devices in their IT infrastructure. With FirePass VE, customers gain the valuable flexibility to add remote access capabilities to their existing virtual environments while maintaining emergency capacity in case of an unexpected event.

In addition, with this new version, FirePass now interoperates with both the FirePass Client and the new BIG-IP Edge Client™. The BIG-IP Edge Client provides advanced roaming, domain detection, and automatic connection, helping users stay connected when transitioning between locations.

  • Advanced Endpoint Security and Enhanced User Experience

FirePass 7.0 includes enhanced endpoint security features for Mac and Linux environments, including updated antivirus, firewall, and anti-malware software detection capabilities. This new version reduces risk of data loss with upgraded features, including Protected Workspace for 64-bit operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 7.

FirePass ensures users receive continuous, seamless access from any authorized device whether they are at home, on a wireless network, or connected via a guest network. With the BIG-IP Edge Client, FirePass can also automatically detect domain changes to connect or reconnect to network resources (even after losing a VPN connection) or halt VPN access when the user connects to a secure LAN.

  • Improved Ease of Management with Integrated Access Services

FirePass 7.0 features advanced hardware identification to help IT administrators identify unauthorized devices and block access to corporate networks and materials as appropriate. Additionally, customers who use VMware virtualization tools in their data center can now use those same management tools to manage SSL VPN capability within their virtual desktop infrastructure. FirePass integration with the VMware View web client allows customers to quickly and easily deploy VMware View for remote users without requiring an additional client installation. Also, FirePass now enhances access to Xen Presentation Server, sending Smart Access filters to XenApp/Presentation Server based on the results of the endpoint inspections.

The new version of the FirePass SSL VPN solution is available now.

SeaMicro Emerges From Stealth Mode, Introduces “Revolutionary” x86 Server

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SeaMicro, a Silicon Valley pioneer of low power server technology, today emerged from stealth mode to launch a new Internet-optimized x86-server that reduces by 75 percent the power and space used by servers.

In development for three years, the SM10000 is the ultimate re-think of the volume server.

Specifically optimized for the workloads and traffic patterns of the Internet, SeaMicro’s SM10000 integrates 512 Intel Atom processors with Ethernet switching, server management and application load-balancing to create a “plug and play” standards-based server that dramatically reduces power draw and footprint without requiring any modifications to existing software.

The key benefits of the SM10000 include:

  • using one-quarter of the power and taking one-quarter of the space to do the same work as the best-in-class volume server,
  • industry leading density: 2,048 central processing units (CPUs) per standard rack,
  • drop–in adoption by running off-the-shelf OSs and applications without change,
  • flexible architecture that can support any CPU.

Reports from Google show that if current power trends continue, the cost of energy consumed by a server during its lifetime could surpass the initial purchase cost.

In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that volume servers consume more than one percent of the total electricity in the US—representing billions of dollars in wasted operating expense each year.

SeaMicro invented and patented a new technique in CPU I/O virtualization, which dramatically reduces non-CPU power draw by eliminating 90 percent of the components from the motherboard. This CPU I/O virtualization allows SeaMicro to shrink a server motherboard from the size of a pizza box to the size of a credit card.

SeaMicro designed a supercomputer-style interconnect fabric that can link 512 mini-motherboards into a single system with an order-of-magnitude reduction in power draw and space. This fabric provides 1.28 terabits per-second throughput, with complete security and redundancy.

Additionally, the architecture can support any CPU instruction set and any protocol, including Ethernet, fibre channel, and data center Ethernet.
SeaMicro also invented Dynamic Compute Allocation Technology (DCAT). DCAT combines CPU management and load balancing, allowing the SM10000 to dynamically allocate workloads to specific CPUs on the basis of power-usage metrics. This ensures that the active CPUs operate in the most energy-efficient utilization ranges.In addition, DCAT technology enables compute pooling—allowing the user to create pools of compute for a given application. This enables the user to dynamically add compute resources to the pool based on predefined utilization thresholds.

The SM10000 simplifies data center operations and management by eliminating layers of switches, terminal servers and load-balancing devices. The system is built on standards-based x86 CPUs, which means it is plug and play – customers can deploy the SM10000 without modifications to existing operating systems, application software or management tools.

SeaMicro’s SM10000 system is comprised of:

  • 512 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors
  • 1 terabyte of DRAM
  • 0 – 64 SATA solid state or hard disk drives
  • 8 – 64 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks; or 2 – 16 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks
  • The entire system is 10 rack units tall (17.5 inches tall).

SeaMicro was founded by industry veterans with expertise in building large data centers and cluster computers.They come from leading technology companies including Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The company has raised $25 million from strategic partners and venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital. SeaMicro was also awarded a $9.3 million grant from the Department of Energy, which was the largest grant awarded to a server company in the Information and Communication Technology Sector.

The SeaMicro SM10000 will be generally available July 30, 2010 in the U.S. and select international locations. The list price for a base configuration is $139,000.

VMware, Novell Expand Strategic Partnership

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VMware and Novell today announced an expansion to their strategic partnership with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system.

Under the agreement, VMware also intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Customers who want to deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware in VMware vSphere virtual machines will be entitled to receive a subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that includes patches and updates as part of their newly purchased qualifying VMware vSphere license and Support and Subscription. Under this agreement, VMware and its extensive network of solution provider partners will also be able to offer customers the option to purchase technical support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server delivered directly by VMware for a seamless support experience.

This expanded relationship between VMware and Novell benefits customers by reducing the cost and complexity of deploying and maintaining an enterprise operating system with VMware solutions.

As a result of this expanded collaboration, both companies intend to provide customers the ability to port their SUSE Linux-based workloads across clouds.  Such portability will deliver choice and flexibility for VMware vSphere customers and is a significant step forward in delivering the benefits of seamless cloud computing.

VMware vSphere is the industry’s most complete and widely deployed virtualization platform, providing the foundation to transform datacenters into dynamic, simplified infrastructures for private, public and hybrid cloud environments. With the most comprehensive set of capabilities for availability, security, resource optimization and business continuity, VMware vSphere enables the next generation of IT services while preserving customers’ flexibility to choose between any type of OS, application and hardware.

10 Days Left To Get Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac At A Discount

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Parallels, the global leader in automation and virtualization software, announced recently that it is offering VMware Fusion users a free trial of Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac and a limited-time opportunity to upgrade to for $39.99 until June 15.

It includes $175 worth of additional software for free: Parallels Internet Security 2009 by Kaspersky (1 year subscription); Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 (Disk Management); and Acronis True Image 11 Home (Backup and Recovery Solutions).

Go here to take them up on it.

Citrix Systems Unveils XenClient

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Today at Citrix Synergy 2010, Citrix announced the first public release of Citrix XenClient, a new client-side virtualization solution, developed in collaboration with Intel, that allows centrally managed virtual desktops to run directly on corporate laptops and PCs, even when they are disconnected from the network.

Representing a major milestone in the industry, XenClient is designed to provide the highest levels of performance, security and isolation through its bare metal architecture and integration with Intel vPro hardware virtualization technologies. XenClient Express, a free trial and evaluation kit that lets IT professionals begin experiencing the benefits of desktop virtualization for their mobile users, is available for immediate download beginning today.

Desktop virtualization is rapidly being adopted as a mainstream way to deliver Windows desktops to business users. Extending virtual desktops to mobile laptop users requires a portable local VM-based desktop solution that delivers the benefits of centralized management and security while fulfilling the great user experience, mobility and flexibility that users expect from a laptop device.

This approach also allows customers to run more than one virtual desktop on the same corporate owned laptop – ideal for companies who want to maintain a secure corporate desktop for each user, while still giving employees the freedom to run their own personal desktop and applications on the same device. Current client-side technologies that run virtual desktops on top of an existing operating system have not been able to match these requirements. XenClient, a bare metal hypervisor which is built on the same proven virtualization technology as Citrix XenServer, is the first solution to offer the no compromise control and security that IT demands and the performance and flexibility users expect.

Citrix XenClient is being demonstrated in the opening day keynote with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton as well as in the hands-on learning labs and show floor at Citrix Synergy 2010, May 12-13 in San Francisco, CA. IT professionals who want to try XenClient for themselves can download the XenClient Express test kit beginning today.

Key Facts and Highlights:

  • XenClient Bare Metal Hypervisor – Based on the proven Citrix XenServer technology, and leveraging Intel virtualization technology, XenClient is a new bare metal client hypervisor that enables each virtual machine to run side-by-side directly on the hardware, rather than hosted within the installed operating system. IT can deliver highly secure locked down corporate environments while giving users the flexibility to install personal applications in a separate virtual machine without compromising the security of either desktop and with a high definition user experience
  • Receiver for XenClient – Citrix Receiver™ for XenClient is a lightweight client that lets users create and manage their own local virtual desktops, or access centrally managed corporate virtual desktops.
  • Synchronizer for XenClient – Laptops with XenClient can connect to Synchronizer to download centrally managed virtual desktops. Synchronizer enables user data to be backed up automatically through a secure connection over the internet. With Synchronizer, IT can define security policies for managed laptops, disable lost or stolen XenClient laptops and restore a user’s virtual desktop on any XenClient based laptop.
  • Availability – XenClient Express, which includes the XenClient bare metal hypervisor, Citrix Receiver for XenClient and Synchronizer for XenClient, is freely available for public download. XenClient express is intended for organizations to trial small deployments within their organization with no charge. XenClient is expected to become generally available with the next release of Citrix XenDesktop later in 2010.