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NextIO Raises $15 Million In Fourth Round Of Financing

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NextIO today announced that the company has received a $15 million round of Series D funding. NextIO is the industry leader in providing intelligent, rack-optimized I/O virtualization (IOV) solutions based on high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) switching technology.

NextIO received support not only from existing VCs and strategic investors, but participation from new strategic investment sources as well. The new funding will be used to expand NextIO’s sales, marketing and support and will allow the company to accelerate the delivery of its second-generation of Express Connect products.

Through I/O virtualization, NextIO products deliver an unprecedented combination of low cost, lower power consumption, greater ease of use, and greatly reduced maintenance requirements. For example, server rollouts that previously required days or weeks can be accomplished in less than 30 minutes, and routine server maintenance time is reduced from hours to minutes.

NextIO’s second-generation products build on the success of the company’s existing Express Connect products, which are at revenue and are currently being deployed in the U.S. and Europe. NextIO solutions are currently in use in a number of different markets for applications such as simulation, adding graphic processors to commodity computing environments, expanding I/O, speeding up existing I/O, and delivering new data center technologies.

Xtravirt Unveils Global Virtualization Capacity Assessment Service

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Xtravirt Limited, which runs a leading global virtualization knowledge portal, today announced the general availability of an online Capacity Assessment Service. The service allows customers to run on-demand capacity assessments of their environments, ensuring correct sizing of virtualization solutions for virtual desktop, server consolidation and data center transformation projects.

“Capacity planning is an essential component for any organisation wishing to adopt virtualisation; whether it be desktop replacement or a server consolidation exercise,” states Paul Davey, CTO of Xtravirt. “We have kept the whole process as simple as possible,” continues Paul. “Collected data, consisting of performance metrics, are securely uploaded to the Xtravirt VReady Portal, where they are analyzed to produce a summary VReady Assessment Report. This can be subsequently extended and we can quickly produce a comprehensive analysis, including full what-if scenarios, solution optimization and licensing calculations. If a client wishes to use a particular brand of server, or server SKU, they can let us know and we can feed it into the design.”

The Xtravirt VReady Portal freely allows customers to download a small data collector module (approximately 10 MB) and start collecting data immediately without agents, additional infrastructure or external consultants.

Double-Take Announces New Licensing And Pricing Model for Virtual Systems

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Double-Take Software today announced a new pricing and licensing model for Double-Take for Virtual Systems that enables customers to simply and cost-effectively protect an unlimited number of virtual machines under one license. The new model makes it easy for customers to deploy disaster recovery solutions based on VMware vSphere 4 by licensing at the hypervisor level, versus the guest virtual machine level, ultimately enabling customers to reap the rewards of server virtualization while delivering a recovery framework that keeps workloads available at all times.

The new licensing model aligns Double-Take for Virtual Systems with the deployment of VMware virtualization and no longer forces end-users to track and count individual workloads. More importantly, the licensing model offers a user-friendly and competitive price/performance structure at a time when IT budgets are under increased pressure.

Double-Take for Virtual Systems provides complete data protection and disaster recovery for virtual machines. It offers full operational support for VMware vSphere 4. Additionally, all other Double-Take Software products support the VMware vSphere 4 release.

McAfee Introduces New Enterprise Firewall Solutions

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McAfee today announced that it has upgraded its enterprise firewall products with new capabilities that help customers increase network security and lower their compliance and operational costs in both physical and virtual network environments. The products, McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler also feature streamlined management through integration with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator software and leverage McAfee global threat intelligence to provide world class protection.

Today, McAfee Firewall Enterprise protects more than 15,000 customers worldwide including thousands of government agencies, Fortune 500 organizations, and seven of the top ten financial institutions. By deploying these next generation capabilities, customers will lower ongoing management costs.

Next generation capabilities include significant advancements in firewall management, hybrid delivery options and integrated layers of threat protection. With the addition of McAfee Firewall Profiler, McAfee Firewall Enterprise is application and identity aware. McAfee Firewall Enterprise is the first and only firewall to use a global reputation-based technology, including TrustedSource reputation and geo-location to filter unwanted traffic before it hits the network—stopping attacks before they happen.

McAfee Firewall Profiler is a revolutionary new capability that pinpoints in real-time how firewalls rules and rule changes impact application availability, usage and security. Profiler turns hours and days of rule creation deployment and troubleshooting work into a matter of clicks by providing administrators visibility into the business impact of rule changes. By providing an intuitive visual context based on users and applications, Profiler reduces the impact of creating or changing specific rules and helps firewall administrators implement new policies and respond rapidly to business needs.

The revised version of Control Center and Firewall Reporter dramatically simplify management of multiple firewalls and enable more accurate audit and compliance reports. Both Profiler and Control Center now integrate with McAfee ePO software. Firewall Control Center now provides ePO software with firewall health data and reports for each firewall.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise is now available in traditional appliance form factors, in a new virtualized hardware appliance and as a software-based firewall virtual appliance. These new delivery options allow customers to take advantage of virtualization technologies to lower cost and increase flexibility when consolidating datacenter and application environments and when bringing up new virtual environments.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available today, starting at $4,900 USD. Exact pricing depends on customer requirements, selected model and associated add-on modules. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4900 per VMWare ESX instance. McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 USD and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900 USD.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Coming Half July, Public Availability Of Hyper-V 2.0 Set For 22 October

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From Microsoft’s Windows Server Division Weblog:

“You may have seen some of the recent news articles that have started to roll out around the RTM and General availability dates of Windows 7.  As Windows Server 2008 R2 is a joint development effort with Windows 7 we are aligned with the same RTM and General Availability (GA) dates.

With that – Windows Server 2008 R2  RTM code is on track to be available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be broadly available about the same time as the Windows 7 GA date of Oct 22.

Download and start testing with the RC candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver“

Via Virtualization.info

Open Kernel Labs Introduces OK:Android

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Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), provider of virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband internet devices, today introduced OK:Android, an off-the-shelf paravirtualized version of the Android smartphone platform.

Using Secure HyperCell Technology, OK:Android enables Android to be used as a guest operating system running in a secure hypercell on top of the OKL4 microvisor, the OK Labs mobile phone virtualization platform. OK:Android gives handset manufacturers (OEMs) a short path to developing and delivering new designs with Android. The combination of OK:Android and OKL4 also extends new levels of security and robustness to the increasingly popular smartphone OS from Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

To date, Android-based handsets have been delivered by Taiwan-based HTC, with additional designs announced by Motorola, Samsung and other handset OEMs. Although Google and the OHA have been successful in engaging device suppliers and building a developer community, semiconductor suppliers, mobile OEMs and mobile network operators (MNOs) still face the significant challenges involved in porting and hosting Android on current chipsets and on new mobile hardware. By providing a flexible framework for Android integration with specific handset hardware and a straightforward way to reuse legacy software in new Android devices, OK:Android helps reduce time to market for a new wave of Android devices.

Since its introduction in 2008, Android has enjoyed a rapidly-growing market presence and bullish prospects for new deployments. One million Android-based handsets have shipped in 2008 as indicated by HTC; and research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics projects nine times that number in 2009. “Virtualization technology is being evaluated by many handset OEMs today, primarily for its significant time-to-market benefits for new phone designs,” noted Andreas Constantinou, lead analyst at VisionMobile. OK Labs virtualization technology already ships in over 300 million mobile handsets, including Android-based devices where OKL4 runs on the baseband processor. With OK:Android and the OKL4 microvisor, OK Labs can further accelerate Android adoption for new designs.

The impact of OK:Android starts by helping OEMs bring designs to market faster, and further extends its impact by incorporating a range of benefits across the emerging Android ecosystem. In particular, OK:Android enables OEMs, MNOs and ISVs to:

  • Offer new options for creating and prototyping Android-based devices and applications with embedded virtualization.
  • Create more secure and robust mobile devices, applications and services with Android and OKL4.
  • Run Android together with other mobile OSes and/or deploy multiple instances of Android on a single device.
  • Consolidate hardware (e.g., base band and application CPU cores) for more aggressive price-points for Android-based handsets.
  • Create new Android-based devices enabled for mobile-to-enterprise virtualization (M2E). M2E is a set of joint solutions developed by Citrix Systems, Inc. and OK Labs for delivering enterprise applications to mobile devices.

OK:Android and OKL4 are available immediately from OK Labs and its global channel partners.