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EMC To Buy Configuresoft

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EMC today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Configuresoft, a provider of server configuration, change and compliance management software. The transaction is expected to close in June, subject to customary closing conditions and is not expected to have a material impact to revenue or EPS for the full 2009 fiscal year.

The announcement builds upon an already successful OEM relationship with Configuresoft. EMC entered this OEM agreement in mid-2008 and the resulting products of EMC Server Configuration Manager and EMC Configuration Analytics Manager are currently helping customers quickly adopt virtualization, dramatically cut costs, monitor policy and security compliance, and ensure governance, risk and compliance (GRC) across their infrastructures.

Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) and Configuration Intelligent Analytics (CIA) — which will continue to be known as EMC Server Configuration Manager and Configuration Analytics Manager based upon the OEM agreement — help companies achieve and maintain continuous operational, regulatory, and security compliance across their data centers. The solutions are able to quickly detect, prioritize and correct configuration compliance issues and help companies implement an automated, continuous enterprise compliance posture. Rich analytics offer customers a powerful dashboard for viewing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provide visibility across network and server domains.

Taking this one step further, by offering powerful integrations with EMC’s network change and configuration management and service management solutions — as well the company’s automated root-cause analysis and application dependency mapping software — customers gain total visibility and control across their physical and virtual IT infrastructure.

Desktone Virtual-D Platform for DaaS Gets An Upgrade

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Desktone today announced significant new capabilities for its Desktone Virtual-D Platform. The enhancements enable service providers to more easily and cost-effectively scale their Desktone-powered desktops as a service (DaaS) offerings, while helping end-customers quickly benefit from virtual desktops.

Desktone’s Virtual-D Platform enables organizations to quickly realize the cost and flexibility benefits of virtual desktop computing without upfront CAPEX investments. Uniquely designed along two tiers (service provider and enterprise), it lets enterprises keep their data secure within their own network, and maintain ownership and control over their Windows OS images, applications and all relating licensing, while outsourcing the physical data center infrastructure powering their virtual desktops to service providers.

The new Virtual-D Platform capabilities enable Desktone partners to efficiently scale and operate their services at attractive price points. They include:

  • Multi-tenancy: Exposes all the previously-existing, rich multi-tenancy capabilities of the underlying platform, making it easier to create, manage and monitor multiple customers on the same shared infrastructure. It is designed to support tenant isolation across hosted and on-premises infrastructure, including environments with stringent security requirements.
  • Multi-data center: Enables service providers to leverage their global data center footprint to support widely distributed enterprise environments and deliver high availability/disaster recovery offerings. Enterprises benefit from improved user experiences over internally implemented VDI, since virtual desktops can be closer to users, and from reliable, continuous service.
  • Virtual-D Service Center: A single management web console for service operators to create, manage and monitor many customers on common network, storage, and virtualization infrastructure.
  • Improved hosting economics: Giving service providers the ability to choose the virtual desktop building block technologies best suited to their business is a fundamental tenet of the Desktone platform. Service providers now have the option to use a VMware ESX or ESXi environment, with or without Virtual Center, to lower their operational costs.

Enterprise customers can take advantage of the following enhancements to the Virtual-D Platform:

  • Rapid service on-boarding: Enterprise administrators can easily upload virtual desktop images to their service provider’s infrastructure to accelerate DaaS implementations and time-to-value.
  • Global language support: Multi-national organizations can more easily leverage the Desktone Virtual-D Portal—a self-service, browser-based tool that allows end-users to access and manage their hosted virtual desktops. The portal now includes support for twelve languages.
  • Delegated Administration: Roles and permissions can be assigned at different levels to desktop administration, helpdesk and management staff, and—at the end-customer’s sole discretion—back to the service provider. All desktop management and desktop access remains under the end-customer’s user authentication authority (e.g., Active Directory).

Desktone-powered DaaS solutions are available through select Desktone service provider partners.

David Marshall’s Sneak Peek at Symantec VIBES

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Symantec‘s R&D engineers are working on a new virtual machine technology that is focused on protecting users from online attacks while surfing the Web.  It works under the concept of setting up multiple virtual machines on a user’s physical machine.  And then, it enables a user to perform operations of different security levels and different scenario based transactions in each of the different virtual machines.  The so-called VIBES prototype puts a new spin on things to significantly improve browser security.

David Marshall got a sneak peek of VIBES at Symantec’s R&D labs, and you can read the rest of his report here.

VMware vSphere 4 Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4, delivered ahead of schedule and with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe.

VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform — VMware Infrastructure 3 — along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.

Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds — cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.

VMware vSphere 4 is available in six editions meeting the requirements, use cases and budgets of customers of all sizes from small businesses to the largest enterprises and government organizations. Prices start at $166 per processor for all in one virtualization solutions for small businesses and go up to VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor delivering features to transform the datacenter into an internal private cloud.

Release: LiveTime’s 64 bit ITIL Service Management Virtual Appliance

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LiveTime Software, a leading provider of ITIL based Web 2.0 Service Management and Help Desk Software, today released version 5.5 of its highly integrated virtual appliance. The latest version of LiveTime’s JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) provides 64 bit native performance, Java 6, Apache Tomcat 6, Apache Web Server 2.2 and LiveTime 5.5. LiveTime’s virtual machine is available for all major virtualized environments such as VMWare, Sun Virtual Box and Citrix XenServer 5.0 and is also available in the Open Virtualization Format.

LiveTime’s JeOS is now production grade and recommended for all environments wishing to virtualize their service management solution. With 64 bit native performance and the ability to address more than 2GB of RAM, LiveTime can scale to any size organization. This version has been specifically optimized for SaaS provider networks and outsourced service providers using LiveTime in a muti-tenant environment. The appliance also includes support for symmetric multiprocessing for optimal performance across virtualized CPU’s.

LiveTime’s virtual appliance includes built-in debugging, configuration and management utilities. Simple guided menus provide easy access to networking, monitoring and general system utilities. The menu driven environment also supports automatic upgrades and SSL out of the box.

Organizations can now leverage LiveTime’s highly scalable ITIL Service Management software with the ease of installation of traditional software. The virtual appliance provides the necessary scalability and security that is difficult to achieve when deployed on existing hardware and operating systems. Since the system has been hardened at the operating system layer, LiveTime provides Just Enough Operating System for its needs. This makes the system easy to update and maintain and provides a very small footprint and a 170MB download.

Likewise Open Finds It Way Into Citrix XenServer

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The integration of Likewise Open with Citrix XenServer now enables IT administrators to protect information and data from unauthorized access — and ensures that virtual servers have the same levels of security as physical servers.

Likewise, the leader in open source audit and authentication for mixed networks — provides identity management solutions that improve security and operational efficiencies by integrating Linux, Unix and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory.

Citrix XenServer provides customers with a robust, scalable, feature-rich virtualization platform that is exceptionally powerful, yet incredibly easy to learn and use — creating a flexible, aggregated pool of computing resources by virtualizing application workloads across any number of servers in the datacenter.

XenServer software with Likewise Open is scheduled to be available in June 2009.