virtualization

Moderro Debuts Xpack Internet Computer

November 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Moderro Technologies today announced the Xpack Internet Computer – a turnkey web-centric cloud computer.

The Xpack Internet Computer is an integrated (hardware, operating system and web management) solution for the cloud desktop. It features a clean and friendly user interface and operating system that was written by Moderro specifically for interacting with web-based applications.

This functionality, combined with simplicity, security, small footprint, energy efficiency, and backward compatibility, make the Moderro Xpack a perfect choice for “cloud-only” office or venue.

The Xpack desktop hardware includes a USB keyboard and mouse and a standard VESA mount option, which allows the hardware enclosure to be mounted to the back of the LCD display. Dual VGA/DVI output options coupled with dual monitor auto-detection, allows Xpack users to increase in productivity by using one display for monitoring, another for working.

Xpack’s energy consumption is a fraction of that of a regular computer with its advanced power-saving technology and software-driven power-management functions. The Xpack is also a solid state computer with no moving parts to ensure reliability especially when used as a public terminal or kiosk solution.

By using web applications, XPack users keep their data on Moderro’s integrated cloud storage, or on a personal USB storage device, which allows Moderro to get rid of local storage and make the system proof from viruses and other malware.

Enterprises are assured their migration to cloud computing will be seamless because the Moderro Xpack is compatible with popular desktop virtualization technologies such as ones from VMWare, Microsoft, and Citrix. This allows IT departments preserve their investment by making the Xpack compatible with existing investment while transitioning to all-cloud computing.

Communications capabilities include a WiFi Antenna and 100/1000 Ethernet port.

Moderro is targeting the Xpack Internet Computer for use in public terminals, kiosks and libraries, education and training facilities, as well as private and government offices ready to migrate to cloud computing. Xpack is available direct from Moderro. The Xpack has a starting price of $395.

IBM To Snap Up Cross-Platform Virtualization Specialist Transitive

November 19, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

IBM today announced it plans to acquire Transitive Corporation, a privately held technology company headquartered in Los Gatos, California, with a research and development team in Manchester, United Kingdom. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Transitive is a leader in cross-platform virtualization and a pioneer in developing technologies that allow applications written for one type of microprocessor and operating system to run on multiple platforms — with little or no modification. As a result, the technology will enable customers to consolidate their Linux-based applications onto the IBM systems that make the most sense for their business needs.

Transitive’s technology has earned the company 48 worldwide patents and several industry awards.

This acquisition is part of IBM’s strategy to help clients optimize the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilization of the servers that run them. With this translation technology, along with existing migration capabilities, IBM systems give businesses a faster, easier path for server consolidation to reduce operational expenses, floorspace and energy costs.

Transitive technology is currently included as part of the IBM PowerVMTM software designed to help customers consolidate their x86 Linux workloads onto IBM Systems. IBM is seeing a growing trend of customers migrating from under-utilized servers to IBM Systems, including onto mainframe and Power Systems. The company is committed to developing additional tools and solutions to make migrations even easier, while minimizing the risk and increasing the financial returns for clients as they consolidate and virtualize to achieve significant business benefit.

KACE Study: Virtualization Gains Momentum With SMBs

November 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

KACE today announced the results of a new study that revealed more than three quarters of medium enterprises have adopted some form of virtualization. In addition the research showed the fastest growing area for virtualization is application virtualization, with 64 percent of medium organizations reporting they have either deployed or plan to do so in the next year. Also uncovered is the need for an integrated solution for systems management and virtualization. Seventy-one percent prefer to combine their systems management tools for both virtual and physical systems in a single, integrated product and many prefer their systems management tools offer integrated application virtualization management capabilities.

The research, consisting of an online survey of more than 500 respondents, the majority from medium-sized enterprises, was conducted by King Research and commissioned by KACE to gather data about the current state of virtualization adoption among medium enterprises. Focusing on hot-button issues such as growth of adoption, barriers to deployment, the importance of managing mixed physical and virtual IT environments, and specific areas of virtualization growth, the research revealed adoption of virtualization among the medium enterprise proved to be as rapid as enterprise adoption.

A summary of the key findings from the study include:

— 64 percent reported they have adopted or plan to adopt application virtualization in the near future, making application virtualization the fastest growing virtualization segment among medium enterprises surveyed;

— 85 percent of respondents revealed they have deployed virtualization technologies or plan to do so within the next twelve months;

— A reduction in hardware requirements was cited by 82 percent as the primary benefit they have achieved with virtualization;

— Over half reported cost savings as the most important consideration when justifying the cost of virtualization;

— 71 percent of respondents who have deployed application virtualization technologies cited they prefer systems management tools for virtual and physical systems offered in a single, integrated product;

— 86 percent felt that virtualization has had a positive impact on them personally — almost half cited they could do more with their budgets due directly to virtualization.

Survey metholodogy

A database of IT professionals was emailed and invited to participate in a Web survey on the topic of virtualization. A total of 519 respondents completed the survey representing hands-on IT professionals (36 percent), IT managers (32 percent), IT executives (2 percent) and others. This survey focused primarily on the responses of the 291 participants (56 percent) from mid-sized companies, those with 100-5000 employees.

The survey was conducted using Zoomerang, an online survey tool. Respondents were not compensated for participating in this survey except to be offered a copy of the final report. This survey was sponsored by KACE, a provider of IT automation appliances.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services Deploys VMware Infrastructure 3

November 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware today announced that Siemens IT Solutions and Services has deployed VMware’s management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3.

Siemens has joined with the VMware vCloud Initiative by developing a virtualized private cloud environment with VMware Infrastructure to provide capacity on demand for mission-critical applications. Siemens used the VMware platform to build out its cloud environment, improve server utilization from 20 percent to over 60 percent, and reduce hardware expenditures by approximately 70 percent compared to the cost of building a cloud environment without virtualization.

Siemens IT Solutions and Services, an operating company of Siemens Corporation, offers consulting services, systems integration, software development, and IT infrastructure management. The business unit has annual revenue of $7 billion. Siemens is using VMware Infrastructure to help both internal and external customers address significant business challenges, including the need for green IT, cost reduction, business innovation, more effective customer service, and faster time to market. The VMware platform also gives Siemens cost-effective and reliable disaster recovery and a resilient application environment that enables delivery of service availability up to 99.99 percent.

CA Announces Integrated Enterprise IT Management Solutions

November 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

CA today announced an integrated suite of Enterprise IT Management (EITM) solutions designed to maximize the business value of virtualization, helping enterprise customers and cloud computing providers improve IT agility and service quality, increase efficiency, and mitigate IT and business risk. The suite leverages one of the industry’s broadest set of IT management, governance and security solutions, spanning virtualized distributed and mainframe computing, storage, network and desktop infrastructures.

CA EITM solutions address this need for virtualization management, and deliver:

Improved Agility

— Provision and monitor resources in the cloud: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps consumers and providers of cloud services to deliver, scale, and manage dynamic computing resources on demand. The solution enables enterprises, Infrastructure Utility providers, business process outsourcers, and cloud computing providers to seamlessly provision and monitor cloud computing resources to allow for overflow capacity during peak demands, rapid policy-based response to business demands, more dynamic failover, and highly efficient infrastructure.
— Accelerate and automate virtualized data center provisioning: CA Data Center Automation Manager empowers IT organizations to integrate and automate virtual and physical server provisioning cycles. By automatically allocating resources in real time based on business policies, customers can accelerate the provisioning of applications into production and rapidly provision additional capacity in response to dynamic business demands.
— Employ change management for dynamic virtualized environments: CA Service Desk Manager’s change management function helps to govern approval of data center automation policies, guided by CA CMDB’s advanced change impact analysis, visibility to complex infrastructure dependencies and record of approved configurations.As automated policies are executed by CA Data Center Automation Manager, CA CMDB and its automated application discovery function can log and track automated changes, allowing change managers to analyze how automated policies are complying with authorized configurations.
— Dynamically extend workload automation to virtualized environments: The integration of CA Workload Automation and CA Data Center Automation Manager provides the unique ability to help to identify and provision computing capacity to accommodate workloads onto virtualized environments. Customers can dynamically implement systems and processes to handle planned and unplanned workload and transaction bursts, ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not breached.

Improved Service Quality

— Assure application performance and availability: CA Wily Application Performance Management helps monitor application performance across both physical and virtual infrastructures, and when integrated with CA Data Center Automation Manager, can trigger the provisioning of additional virtualized resource pools to avoid or resolve performance problems.
— Discover, track, and monitor the performance of virtual server resources: CA Advanced Systems Management helps IT organizations to discover, track and monitor virtual resources across a breadth of virtual and physical platforms. CA IT Client Manager can perform hardware and software inventory of virtual systems as well as update them with new software and critical security patches.
— Avoid human configuration errors: CA Data Center Automation Manager helps avoid application degradations and outages by maintaining configuration consistency in virtual environments. Using autonomic policies requiring no human intervention, the solution tracks and remediates configuration drift from development through production.
— Improve high availability, business continuity and disaster recovery: CA XOsoft High Availability offers fast and reliable failover and failback capabilities for virtualized servers and applications. CA ARCserve Backup delivers reliable, enterprise-class data protection across multiple hardware and software platforms, including virtual machines. CA can offer replication and high-availability assurance for all resources.
— Assure virtual network availability: CA is architecting its premier network management solutions, CA eHealth Network Performance Manager and CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager, to discover, monitor and deliver fault and performance management for virtualized network resources, leveraging years of customer success with physical network management. This will provide the agility to manage virtual and physical networks from a single pane of glass, help to ensure the quality of network service, help to improve management efficiency, and mitigate the risk of business disruption from network outages.

Increased Efficiency

— Dramatically streamline processes and reduce costs: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to reduce process and organizational complexity and address labor and application costs by implementing automated virtualization-based data center processes. CA is working on integrating CA Data Center Automation Manager with CA Service Catalog. This will help to reduce component complexity through standard service, application and computing resource catalogs and bills of materials. CA IT Asset Manager empowers organizations to streamline the request, approval and assignment of available virtual images.
— Increase server and VM utilization, optimize energy management, and reduce facilities costs: CA NSM identifies and reports on server utilization across the data center, and identifies and prioritizes server candidates for virtualization. CA Advanced Systems Management can dynamically allocate server resources to virtual guests based on their requirements, thereby improving virtual machines to host utilization. CA Data Center Automation Manager can optimize the number of servers required and the energy they consume.
— Optimize asset management, chargeback and virtualization planning: CA IT Asset Manager and CA Service Accounting ease the complex task of tracking cost, licenses and assets across virtualized resources. The solutions also simplify the process of charging lines of business and other stakeholders for their use of shared and dedicated virtualized resources. CA IT Asset Manger, in conjunction with CA Clarity PPM, provides IT leaders with enhanced ability to manage costs, project workflows, and staff for virtualization deployments, aligning the investment to defined and measurable business outcomes. CA Advanced Systems Management assists customers in avoiding VM sprawl and its accompanying cost and complexity while managing demand for additional resources.
— Consolidate the management of security and access policies: CA Access Control’s management console helps an administrator to create, manage and track hundreds of policies across multiple virtual and physical server platforms. This enables a consistent level of protection and reduces the time and resources required to secure these dynamic IT resources.
— Extend mainframe virtualization: CA VM Manager Management Suite for Mainframe Linux helps IT organizations to manage and secure z/VM systems that support Linux for System z by managing guest systems and enabling provisioning. This integrated suite of products includes solutions for automated operations, service level management, backup and recovery, storage management and security management. By enabling organizations to maximize machine, personnel, tape and DASD resources, it helps organizations control costs, maintain high service levels and provide efficient system performance. Planned integration with CA Data Center Automation Manager to help customers to gain end-to-end provisioning visibility and management.

Mitigated IT and Business Risks

— Plan data center virtualization efforts: CA Data Center Automation Manager can help to discover applications across data centers and enable customers to have critical IT application and infrastructure visibility. Armed with a clear picture of data center configurations between applications, servers, storage and other infrastructure, customers can profile applications based on importance and I/O characteristics. With the addition of CA CMDB’s mapping of applications to business services, they can also focus virtualization efforts on less-critical, lower-risk services and computing resources.
— Secure virtualization environments: CA Access Control manages several of the security risks common to virtualization by protecting critical resources through Separation of Duties (SoD) for privileged or shared accounts. The solution also provides consistent access control policies, resource protection, and entitlement reporting across virtualization hosts and the guest operating systems.
— Maintain compliance: Dynamic virtualization can change computing and information architectures, disrupt tracking and reporting, and also undermine compliance governance based on static, physical environments. CA’s virtualization management offerings, with their ability to track and report on virtualized resources, can help customers monitor their compliance, despite the changes inherent in virtualized environments. CA Access Control and CA Audit provide a comprehensive set of server resource protection reports that can reduce the time, cost and complexity of the compliance process in enterprise environments.

Alacritech Debuts 10GbE Accelerators Delivering Server Utilization Optimization

November 17, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Alacritech today announced the Scalable Network 10Gb optical and copper Ethernet Accelerators designed to assist IT administrators in optimizing data center server utilization. Alacritech announced the SEN3001EF PCI-e fiber SNA and the SEN3001ET PCI-e copper SNA. The addition of Alacritech’s 10GbE Scalable Network Accelerators (SNAs) to its product family gives users a single adapter that offers a NIC with stateless offload support and Dynamic TOE functionality while providing increased server utilization, optimization and performance as it also controls power and cooling costs.

Alacritech’s innovative Dynamic TCP Offload technology is natively integrated with Microsoft’s TCP Chimney Offload architecture and supports Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Stateless offloads are offered through the 10GbE SNA’s NIC feature and will be supported under Linux, OpenSolaris, Windows and Mac OS X. In addition, Alacritech’s 10GbE SNAs will provide Dynamic TOE support for Hyper-V when Microsoft makes its next major Windows 2008 release available. The 10GbE SNA will also support VMware ESX, including NetQueue, in mid 2009.

As GbE permeates the edge of the enterprise, the need to provide sufficient bandwidth to clients and media-rich applications increases and makes it essential for data centers to begin migrating to 10GbE at the core. In addition, edge clients as well as outside users communicating across the WAN are creating large volumes of rich content that is being stored and forwarded by data centers. As such, more servers are allocating more cycles to moving content rather than processing it. Unfortunately, server and processor designs historically have not been optimized for moving data. Incorporating an Alacritech GbE or 10GbE SNA optimizes a server to move data and operate more efficiently.

Alacritech’s 10GbE SNA is built to move data efficiently, maximizing throughput and minimizing latency. Compared to competitive products, the 10GbE SNA allows administrators to configure servers with fewer processors while delivering targeted performance and utilization and consuming 30 percent less power. The 10GbE SNA enables servers to support more clients, increasing their useful lifespan and sparing IT departments the burden of buying, installing and maintaining additional servers to handle the workload.

Alacritech’s 10GbE SNA with Dynamic TOE and NIC support is ideal for large block size applications including backup, SQL logging, media streaming, web server, video-on-demand, DSS and OS paging. In addition, the 10GbE SNA increases performance for small block size applications including webserver logging, exchange/email and file servers.