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AppSense Releases Environment Manager 8.0 For Personalizing Virtual And Physical Microsoft Platforms

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AppSense, provider of user environment management solutions for large-scale environments, today announced that its newly released Environment Manager 8.0 leverages Microsoft server technologies, providing a scalable and efficient way to personalize both virtual and physical desktops across the enterprise.

The only enterprise solution that enables standardized virtual desktop environments to be fully – and automatically – personalized, AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 accelerates virtual desktop adoption by rapidly configuring desktops and applications with a user’s personal and policy settings without administrator intervention.

By decoupling both policy and personalization data from the desktop, managing them independently and applying them on-demand, AppSense’s user environment management solution lets IT use a combination of desktop and application delivery methods—such as desktop virtualization, presentation virtualization, streamed applications and local and provisioned desktops—and easily and transparently migrate large groups of users from physical to virtual desktops.

Release: Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

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Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac, which enables users to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems side-by-side with Mac OS X. The new version improves OS integration, performs up to 50% faster and incorporates a range of security, backup and power saving features to give Mac users a truly easy, fast and powerful desktop computing solution.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac introduces support for DirectX 9, DirectX Pixel Shader 2.0 and OpenGL 2.0, providing fast video performance, while the Adaptive Hypervisor dynamically allocates resources to meet user needs. The responsiveness to all applications is further enhanced as the virtualization engine has been optimized to consume 15-30% less resources than previous versions.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac addresses two other primary user concerns: security and backup. The software offers users peace of mind through Parallels Internet Security powered by Kaspersky for anti-virus, firewall, scanner, recovery, filtering and identity protection as well as Acronis True Image Home backup and restore and Acronis Disk Director Suite. These three additions to Parallels Desktop represent $175 in extra value along with a more complete user experience.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is available in English and localized versions will soon be available in Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Polish and Russian.

The standard retail price (SRP) of Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is $79.99. New users can test a free, fully-functional copy for 15 days. Current Parallels Desktop users can upgrade their existing software for only $39.99 – a 50% off promotional price available until November 30, 2008. Users that purchased version 3.0 on or after September 1, 2008, qualify for a free upgrade to version 4.0.

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac is available at Amazon.com, Apple Store, Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics, MicroCenter, Office Depot, Staples and hundreds of other retailers nationwide.

Meru Networks Launches “Virtual Ports” For Wireless Network

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Meru Networks has brought the techniques of virtualization to the wireless world, enabling the optimization of radio frequency (RF) resources to bring wireless LAN performance and reliability level with wired networks, reducing the price of wireless networking to a fraction of its wired equivalent.

Meru’s established “virtual cell” WLAN architecture, first launched in 2003, puts all access points on a single radio channel. This benefits companies by reducing or eliminating the need for costly RF planning, while ensuring excellent quality of service for mobile users.

With today’s introduction of Meru’s new “virtual port” capability, every wireless client device accessing the WLAN (laptop, phone, PDA, scanner) gets its own unique identifier (BSSID) that stays with the device wherever it moves within the WLAN.

This lets enterprises control the WLAN resources that an individual client device gets – just as in a wired switched network – providing enterprises with the ability to predict the cost of managing, provisioning and growing the wireless network in the way they have managed servers, storage and wired network resources.
The increased control realized with virtual port technology is especially important as wireless becomes the primary edge technology for network connectivity in an increasing number of environments, and as new and diverse wireless devices, based on the high-performance 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, proliferate throughout the enterprise.

Virtual port technology is available with Meru’s System Director 3.6 software, which is available now. Meru customers with active support contracts can upgrade to virtual port capability at no charge.

Cisco Partners With VMware For Its MDS SANs

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As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

The combined solution of Cisco MDS SANs with VMware’s Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) helps customers to more easily implement storage consolidation, disaster recovery, business continuity and storage backup solutions, as well as improve the visibility, security, and traffic isolation of applications.

VMware provides this functionality as part of the VDC-OS, which increases ROI while enabling the flexibility customers need to build next-generation data centers that are highly elastic, self-managing and self-healing. Cisco MDS SANs can now be virtual machine-optimized, delivering a resilient, high-performance fabric to support large, dense virtual environments by providing consistent policy, visibility, and diagnostics for virtual machines across the data center.

Cisco SANs optimized by VMware provide security, mobility, performance monitoring and capacity planning at the virtual machine level, enabling IT managers to better monitor, manage, and scale SAN-attached virtual machines. For example, IT managers can now move, add or change servers without reconfiguring SAN switches or storage arrays, and servers can retain their SAN identity even when moved or replaced in the server chassis.

Cisco and VMware also jointly offer virtualization consulting services to help customers create and deploy server, network and storage virtualization solutions that can reduce cost by provisioning new applications quickly and more safely, while maintaining high levels of application performance.

IBM Adds VMware Technology To Lotus Foundations

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Looking to steal the limelight from this week’s official launch of Microsoft Essential Business Server, IBM Monday said it is adding VMware’s virtualization technology to its IBM Lotus Foundations hardware/software appliances, allowing customers to run Windows on the Linux-based appliances.

Lotus Foundations competes head-to-head with Microsoft’s Windows Small Business Server and Windows Essential Business Server. This week Microsoft is slated to begin shipping the new Windows Essential Business Server 2008, a pre-configured software bundle targeting mid-size companies with up to 250 PCs. It’s also expected to begin shipping Windows Small Business Server 2008, a new release of the popular package for small businesses.

IBM is adding the VMware hypervisor to the Lotus Foundations server, allowing customers to run Windows and Windows applications on the system. VMware for the Lotus Foundations servers is currently in beta testing. The Lotus Foundations servers run on an optimized version of Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with an operating system kernel that’s less than 100 Mbytes.