Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced the North American availability of Resource Coordinator Virtual Edition (RCVE), software that provides enterprise data centers and cloud computing providers with improved management control, rapid reconfiguration capabilities, and fully automated failover for both physical and virtualized blade servers.
virtualization
Neptuny Releases Caplan 3.0, Capacity Management Solution
Neptuny today launched Caplan 3.0, a business-aware Capacity Management solution for large data centres and networks. The new version of Caplan facilitates successful implementation of virtualization and consolidation initiatives as well as the production of future scenarios to enable the alignment between IT resources and business initiatives.
Rationalizing IT resources while still being able to support the business is imperative for all corporations. Also, with a slumping economy it becomes even more important to optimize the use of resources and to reduce operating and capital costs. The new version of Caplan 3.0 reduces overcapacity by its ability to determine the amount of capacity required at any given time leading to a more cost effective and greener IT department. Caplan 3.0 can also predict capacity shortages, thereby reducing the likelihood of any performance or capacity-related incidents as well as ensuring that the minimum capacity required to keep the business running is available in the event of any IT failure.
Caplan™3.0 can be leveraged for virtualized environments as well. The latest release of Caplan v3.0 now supports several virtualization technologies including VMware ESX Server, AIX Micro partitions, HP nPartition/vPartition, Solaris Dynamic System Domains, and MS Virtual Server 2005. For all these technologies, Caplan has the ability to identify systems to be consolidated and to safely perform consolidation and virtualization initiatives as it can simulate both physical consolidation and virtualization. Once initiatives have been undertaken Caplan will automatically monitor the infrastructure behaviour to notify whether its behaviour does not differ from detected baseline. Therefore, Caplan™can help customers to reduce risks involved in overloading the virtualized infrastructure in their data centres.
Additionally, Caplan 3.0 provides specific features enabling Capacity Management to be easily integrated with ITSM tools and workflow platforms, thus allowing external third-party application to leverage Caplan services (via SOAP Web Services and HTTP/XML calls) and to asynchronously push data into Caplan Capacity Database (via J2EE JMS Messages). This allows Caplan to promote an improved IT culture through the introduction of a structured capacity management process that complies with ITIL v3 best practices regarding Capacity Management.
HP Takes Next Step To Support Future Growth
HP today outlined the results of its three-year IT transformation and laid out the company’s IT strategy to support future growth for fiscal year 2009 and beyond.
As a result of the effort, HP has reduced its IT operating costs by approximately half; provided more reliable information for executives to make better business decisions; and, established a more simplified and dependable IT infrastructure that provides improved business continuity and supports the company’s future growth.
The initiative began shortly after Mott joined HP in July 2005. Starting in fiscal year 2009, the transformation will lower IT costs by more than $1 billion per year from fiscal year 2005 levels. This cost reduction is even more impressive considering HP added more than $25 billion in revenue during the three years since the transformation began.
The transformation focused on five major initiatives: next-generation global data centers, portfolio management, workforce effectiveness, building a world-class technology organization and a true enterprise data warehouse. Through aligning its entire global organization on these five initiatives, HP has reduced complexity and added significant capability and quality of service.
The HP IT organization now operates under a strategic framework in which teams are deployed to deliver more business innovation through a smaller number of global and common applications. These applications are running in the next-generation data centers, where the technology is constantly refreshed in modular-designed white space.
By creating global and common applications, HP IT is able to focus on new capabilities and devote 80 percent of IT employees to innovation that is aligned with business strategies and future growth opportunities.
DataCore And Promark Set Up A Distribution Partnership
DataCore Software and Promark Technology today announced a new distribution relationship under which Promark Technology will distribute DataCore’s storage virtualization solutions in the United States.
DataCore storage virtualization software removes physical, geographic and device-specific restrictions of data storage equipment that frequently slow down, interrupt or endanger computer operations – making it practical for organizations large and small to get the fullest utilization, highest availability and fastest performance from their disk storage assets by consolidating and automating essential data protection measures and storage management practices.
Ideally suited for VMware and other virtual server customers, DataCore is unique in providing true high-availability, auto-failover/failback business continuity and DR solutions that are perfect for SMB customers, but perform to meet the needs of enterprise customers – at prices starting under $10,000.
DataCore Software is manufacturer-independent software that runs on any industry standard server or virtual server. It is certified on all the major virtual server platforms, including VMware, Microsoft and Citrix, and supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections. As a result, DataCore provides a persistent solution that survives hardware obsolescence and under DataCore’s unique “Carry-forward” Value Protection Program is fully upgradeable without penalty.
Ulteo Delivers Open Source Virtual Desktop Solution
Ulteo announced today that they were releasing the first installable version of their Open Virtual Desktop solution for enterprises. Delivering faster deployment times and ease of management for the IT department, this first release can be integrated easily into an existing professional Linux or Windows IT environment. The solution can be up and running in a few minutes, delivering rich desktop applications to corporate users.
The Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop is a great solution for corporations who want to reduce the Total Costs of Ownership of the end user desktop, a cost that cripples IT budgets. Moreover, the Ulteo open source business model remove the typical upfront licence fee and replace it with a much more affordable subscription support plan instead.
Release: Fedora 10, Including Virtualization Improvements
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous technologies and continues to lay the groundwork for derivative open source distributions throughout the enterprise.
Since its inception, Fedora has adopted a leadership role in the development of open source software and continuously demonstrates its potential across the enterprise. This community of users and developers have blazed the trail in key feature development and actively forms the roadmap for open source technologies found in many platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Fedora 10, the tenth release in five years, features substantial virtualization improvements for remote installation and management of storage provisioning. These features will make system administration of virtual machine hosts and guests easier and more capable of automation, especially as they are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, Fedora 10 includes NetworkManager connection sharing, allowing laptop users with an Ethernet or mobile broadband connection to provide Internet routing to others through the laptop wireless interface, for instant collaboration anywhere, anytime.