laptops & computers

Oracle Slapped With Suit Tied to Fusion Applications

2009-12-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

A Georgia company is suing Oracle for fraud and copyright infringement, saying the vendor is unlawfully using the company's technology to build user interfaces associated with Fusion Applications, a long-awaited, next-generation product family set for release next year.

MB Technologies of Warner Robins, Georgia, is the developer of Bindows, a toolkit that lets developers create "the exact look and feel" of a Windows user interface for their Web applications, according to the complaint.

The company entered a licensing agreement in 2004 with EPM (enterprise performance management) vendor Hyperion, according to the suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

After Oracle acquired Hyperion in 2007, MB asked for an addendum to the original agreement, the complaint states.

The companies met several times, and Oracle executives told MB the vendor intended to use the Bindows technology only in Hyperion products that existed at the time of the acquisition, it adds.

Oracle officials also said the company planned to replace Bindows entirely "in the near future," according to the complaint. Those pledges were used by Oracle to "induce" MB to agree to an addendum "at lower license pricing," it states.

But in October 2007, Oracle sent MB a draft of the addendum that included a section stating it would license Bindows "for use in Oracle Fusion products," something the companies had never actually discussed, and which would "necessarily have changed the pricing of the aforesaid license," according to the complaint.

MB then offered to negotiate a Bindows licensing deal for Fusion, but Oracle ultimately removed the clause from the addendum, according to the complaint.

However, in recent months MB learned that Oracle was in fact using Bindows in connection with Fusion products, according to an e-mail exchange filed with the suit.

"Bindows is used in three EPM components that are add-ons to the Fusion applications," Oracle executive Robert Gersten wrote in reply to MB, according to the filing. "We believe it would be better for my group to not re-write these GUIs of these components. It would be nice to work out something that is favorable to both parties."

But the two sides were apparently unable to agree on a price.

MB claims it made repeated attempts to reach an agreement with Oracle, but that ultimately, its "good faith efforts were in vain."

The company is asking for a variety of damages, including any profits Oracle has made from the use of Bindows. An attorney for MB Technologies could not immediately be reached.

Oracle has not yet filed a response to MB's complaint. An Oracle spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

5 must-have IT management technologies for 2010

2009-12-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

As more companies expand virtualization deployments and consider cloud computing, the average IT environment will grow ever more complex. For enterprise IT managers in 2010, that means they must update the technologies they use to monitor, manage and optimize the environment.

Management must-dos in 2009

Industry watchers say some of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations in 2010 are more cultural than technical. From breaking the trend of working in domains, or silos, and aligning IT services better with business needs, IT departments face many formidable tasks in 2010. Virtualization and cloud computing, for instance, require actions be taken across IT domains and will push IT organizations to break down such barriers to new technologies.

"A big limitation today in achieving the true value of some of the latest tools is IT organization, especially in enterprises. Enterprises work in silos, not only between different domain areas (for instance, network, application, server, desktop and storage) but also within domain areas such as Linux server management, mainframe management, Windows management and virtualization management," says David Williams, research vice president at Gartner. "This situation is understood and is slowly starting to be addressed with new roles and cross-domain teams being established. In 2010, IT organizations will continue to visit how they are organized to allow IT operations to become more service-centric and business-aligned."

Analysts say if the cultural hurdles can be cleared, a handful of tools will make adopting advanced technologies in 2010 easier for the majority of IT departments. Here is a brief look at five technologies industry watchers say could become mandatory for optimized IT service delivery and advanced data center operations in the coming year.

No. 1: IT service assurance

Managing the performance of IT service delivery involves myriad technologies reporting on various perspectives, including the user experience with an application.

That means IT departments need to be able to get visibility into network traffic flows as well as application performance across multiple components supporting IT services. From advanced discovery technology to traffic flow analysis to transaction monitoring, IT departments need to see the entire path of a service -- even as it exits in the corporate network and travels through external cloud environments, for instance.

The premise of IT service assurance isn't entirely new and until recently was more commonly a concern for service providers, but enterprise IT organizations have started to evolve into service providers in their own right. Companies such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and now EMC are touting the ability to provide insight into the life cycle of an IT service. The speed at which companies are adopting and expanding their use of virtualization and the growing interest in internal and external cloud computing environments heightens the need for such technology in 2010.

BlackBerry service hit by second outage in a week

2009-12-23T12:55:00.000-08:00

IDG News Service - An outage hit BlackBerry smartphone service in the Americas on Tuesday night, operator Research In Motion confirmed. The outage is the second to affect users in less than a week.

"Some BlackBerry customers in the Americas are currently experiencing delays in message delivery," the company said in a statement. "Our technical teams are actively working to resolve this issue for those impacted. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Hundreds of messages are hitting social-network services like Twitter every few minutes from users experiencing problems. The volume indicates the problems are widespread and affecting users on several carriers.

The support line and RIM's Internet-based support forums offered no additional information on how long the outage is expected to last.

E-mail service was disrupted last week when some users were unable to receive messages for several hours on Thursday morning. The cause of the problem has not yet been revealed. Before that the last wide-scale outage occurred in February 2008 when a software upgrade at RIM took service out for several hours.

At the end of November RIM had about 36 million customers on the BlackBerry service. The company doesn't break down subscribers by region but just under two-thirds of the US$3.9 billion it recorded in revenue during the third quarter came from the U.S. and Canada where the outage is centered.

iMac firmware update fails to fix flickering problems

2009-12-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

iMac have reported that the firmware update released earlier this week has not solved their flickering display problems, according to Apple's own support forum.

Apple issued the firmware update Monday, saying that it was designed to "address issues that may cause image corruption or the display to flicker" on 27-in. iMacs equipped with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards.

But users continue to complain on Apple's support forum that the update was no fix for them.

"Flickering/tearing has been occurring occasionally (once a day maybe), so I downloaded and installed the firmware update, but I'm still experiencing the same problem," said a user identified as "gjdhks999" today on the massive thread dedicated to the flickering issue. That thread lists more than 1,600 messages and has a view count of more than 263,000, making it the most-read of those on the iMac forum.

"I, like everyone else, has verified that the firmware update does NOT fix the issue," added Joe Liu on the same thread. "Strangely enough I seem to be able to recreate the issue by doing the following things: 1. Use computer all day. 2. Turn off overnight. 3. Turn on in morning -- within 90 minutes it's flickering."

Some users, in fact, claimed that the firmware update had made their iMac start flickering. "Ran the firmware update last night and had no flickering," said Patrick Seguin on Tuesday. "Today I have flickering galore."

Others, however, said the update had at least reduced the flickering. One, dubbed "smakus" on the thread, guessed that the firmware update had reduced the clock speed of the ATI's card's graphic processor. "The power supply and video card have drastically reduced in temperature," smakus reported. "The flickering is still present, although it happens once, then immediately goes away, whereas before, it would flicker then steadily escalate, getting worse and worse until the blackouts started. This tells me one thing. They most likely de-clocked the video card to produce less heat, or are somehow ramping it down until the power is needed."

Display issues have plagued Apple's 27-in. iMac desktop computers since the new machines debuted Oct. 20. Users have reported cracked screens, a yellow tint in part of the display, irritating flickers and black bands.

The problems prompted one Canadian Web developer to collate the complaints on a specially built Web site, and may have been one of the reasons why Apple slapped a two-week shipping delay on 27-in. iMacs earlier this month.

That Web developer, Scott Pronych of Nova Scotia, who created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, has added a "Flickering after Firmware Update" category to the site. As of mid-day Wednesday, Pronych had logged 26 accounts of the firmware failing to fix the flickering problem.

Acer 3-D Aspire Laptop, Complete with Glasses, Arrives

2009-10-27T11:01:00.001-07:00

The Acer Aspire 5738DG notebook can turn 2-D content into 3-D. It features high-definition playback, Dolby surround sound and a 15.6-inch CineCrystal, LED-backlit display coated with a 3-D film. The 3-D glasses are included.

Acer’s newest notebook, the Aspire 5738DG, announced Oct. 21, comes with its own 3-D glasses.

The entertainment-focused notebook features a TriDef 3-D solution that includes a 3-D screen, software and glasses for 3-D visuals, and it can additionally convert 2-D content into a “vivid 3-D experience,” according to Acer.

“This holiday season, we are seeing 3-D content become more prevalent in popular films and games,” Ray Sawall, senior manager of product marketing for Acer America’s, said in a statement. “The new Acer Aspire 5738DG notebook enables consumers to enjoy exciting new 3-D entertainment on a mobile PC that can also replicate a 3-D experience from standard 2-D content.”
The transition from viewing regular old documents, e-mail and other everyday items to the 3-D experience comes with just a mouse click and results from a combination of the notebook’s 15.6-inch CineCrystal HD display and a 3-D film that’s said to cling to the panel, pixel, by pixel, enabling the LCD technology to deliver 3-D images. The 3-D glasses filter 2-D to 3-D. Videos and photos can be viewed in 3-D via the TriDef Media Player, and a TriDef Ignition tool can convert 2-D games and applications with DirectX 9 to 3-D.

(Microsoft’s DirectX at one time created vulnerabilities that hackers exploited. In July, however, Microsoft addressed the issues and offered fixes.)

Beneath all that entertainment goodness, the Aspire 5738DG-6165 3D notebook runs Windows 7 Home Premium and features a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T6600, a Mobile Intel PM45 Express chipset, an ATI Mobility Radeon hard drive 4570 with up to 2304MB off HyperMemory, 4GB of DDR2 1,066MHz memory and a 320FB, 5,400RPM SATA hard drive.

There’s a multi-in-1 digital media card reader, a Crystal Eye Webcam, a Dolby surround-sound system with two stereo speakers and a touchpad with multigesture that allow users to navigate with finger pinches, flicks and swirls.

There’s 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, a 6-cell battery and 4 USB ports, and the notebook weighs 6.16 pounds and measures, at its thickest point, 1.5 by 15.1 by 9.9 inches.

It will be available for $779.99 immediately following Microsoft’s Oct. 22 launch of Windows 7.

In the same month, Acer has also launched two additional laptops, each with exciting features and difficult-to-remember names. The Aspire One AOD250 is a dual-boot netbook with both Android and Microsoft Windows XP operating systems, and the Aspire 5738PG is a 15.6-inch notebook with Windows 7 and a touchscreen.

Samsung, Phoenix Offering Instant-On Technology for Laptops, Netbooks

2009-10-27T11:00:00.001-07:00

Samsung and Phoenix Technologies announced that they will work together to bring notebooks and netbooks with instant on-off capabilities to market. Recently, Acer and Hewlett-Packard have offered comparable capabilities.

Samsung Electronics and Phoenix Technologies announced a strategic agreement on Oct. 21, saying they were planning to work together to deliver notebooks and netbooks with instant on-off capabilities, extended battery life and a more secure user experience.
“All-day, instant-on and always-available mobile computing is the very foundation of our P.C. 3.0 vision,” Phoenix CEO Woody Hobbs wrote in a statement. “Consumers expect their notebooks and netbooks to perform with the speed and agility of smartphones, and Phoenix is very pleased to be working with Samsung to offer this user experience across all of Samsung’s notebook and netbook product line.”

Analyst Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, explains that Phoenix is a BIOS company. The BIOS alternative environment has been used to run before the operating system to make sure a system is free of bugs and that all’s well.
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“It enumerates the hardware and then calls up the operating system,” Kay told eWEEK.

Samsung and Phoenix could be planning to offer dual-boot devices that use BIOS to offer instant-on capabilities, or it could offer a version of the BIOS environment on its own for light devices intended for surfing the Web and checking Web-based e-mail.

They haven’t come out and said that’s what they’re planning, but it’s possible,” said Kay, who explains that, less than delighted with Microsoft Windows Vista, OEMs were looking for alternative environments. However, he adds, “The dynamics are going to change with the arrival of Windows 7. The pressure for other environments is going to decrease.”

In their joint statement, Samsung and Phoenix point out that netbook shipments are “exploding” and expected to reach 25 million units by the end of the year, according to Gartner.

Should the pair offer a netbook-like device with a unique environment, but that’s “a strange beast people don’t recognize, people will avoid it,” said Kay. Alternately, he went on, should it be positioned as an inexpensive device for light e-mailing and surfing, Samsung might makes its first significant contact with consumer PC owners in the United States.

On Oct. 15, Acer introduced the Aspire One AO250 netbook, which features two operating systems, Windows XP Home and the open-source Android. Acer attributed to Android the ability to equip the netbook with instant-on Internet capability.

Hewlett-Packard’s thin-and-light 5310m, set to arrive with the Oct. 22 debut of Microsoft’s Windows 7, similarly offers QuickLook3, which offers 10 seconds of e-mail capabilities on a powered-down notebook, and QuickWeb, for 20 seconds of browsing. These instant-on tools can be used without fear of viruses, HP has noted, since they run separate from the operating system.

“As the world’s fastest-growing vendor in the ultra-mobile computing market, Samsung is committed to bring to market innovative technology solutions that simplify consumers’ lives,” offered Samsung in the joint statement. “Working with Phoenix, we plan to deliver to our mobile consumers innovative and intuitive next-generation mobile computing devices that fit their emerging needs and desires.”

enovo ThinkPad SL Series Laptops Offer Windows 7 at Low Cost

2009-10-27T10:59:00.002-07:00

Lenovo introduced two new ThinkPads for cost-conscious businesses, each with Windows 7 and complementary features such as multitouch touchpads. More Think- and Idea-branded Lenovo PCs will also feature Windows 7.

With the Oct. 22 release of Microsoft’s Windows 7, Lenovo has announced it is offering a portfolio of Think- and Idea-branded PCs running the new operating system, as well as the availability of two new laptops — the ThinkPad SL410 and SL510 — both of which are particularly geared toward businesses with limited IT resources.

“For three years, Microsoft and Lenovo engineers have worked tirelessly together to jointly create a PC experience that is better, faster, more stable and more secure,” said Rory Read, president and CEO of Lenovo, in a statement.

“This has been an unparalleled effort to integrate hardware and software from the ground up,” Read added. “As a result, we’ve created new innovations in touch technology, improved speed and performance across the board and developed a host of other enhancements that will make a meaningful difference to our customers worldwide.”

The SL models feature 16:9 high-definition screens, Intel Core 2 Duo processors and options for 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth connectivity. Plus, playing to Windows 7’s touch strengths, the touchpads feature multitouch, for two-finger scrolling and expanding and minimizing screen views.

There’s VibrantView and anti-glare technology and HDMI and VGA output for high-definition and standard displays. VOIP calls being a small-business conferencing mode of a choice, Lenovo has increased the resolution of the webcam, improved the digital microphone and added a microphone mute button.

Also for those challenged on the IT staffing front, the laptops come with ThinkVantage Technologies (TVTs), which Lenovo describes as hardware and software tools that assist users in connecting to the Internet, recovering data, managing passwords and similar tasks.

The SL models are said to be among Lenovo’s “greenest,” as they’re the first ThinkPads to use post-consumer recycled materials. They’re also EPEAT Gold and Energy Star 5.0 compliant.

As for the rest of the updated portfolio, on those certified for “Enhanced Experience,” Windows 7 starts up 56 percent quicker than Windows XP or Vista and shut down in as few as five seconds. There are security and productivity TVTs, and two models, the ThinkPad X200 Tablet and T400 laptop, feature SimpleTap, which works in conjunction with touchscreens.

(On Oct. 14, Acer debuted the Aspire 5738PG, a 15.6-inch notebook with a multitouch display.)

“Our collaboration and joint innovations have resulted in faster and more reliable scenarios so customers can use their PCs in more new and exciting ways,” said Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s OEM division, in the statement.

The ThinkPad SL410 and SL510 are now available, with pricing starting at $529.

Windows 7 Prompts All-In-One PC Surge

2009-10-27T10:59:00.001-07:00

Touch is the hot new interface, and with the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 7, with its integrated multitouch capabilities, the trend is set to continue, says a new report, which additionally calls out Apple and Hewlett-Packard as trend setters.

On the eve of Windows 7’s Oct. 22 arrival, the all-in-one computer market has been on the rise and will continue to “surge,” according to an Oct. 21 report from the NPD Group.

The growth is said to be the result of more entry-level price points and the use of touch as an interface — a feature particularly suited to Windows 7, with its integrated multitouch capabilities.

While 3.2 million AIO desktop PCs shipped worldwide in 2007, MPD Group expects the number to rise to 5.9 million in 2010. It sees “clear momentum for the next input interface to be touch,” said the research firm in a statement, “with other possibilities like voice recognition also in the works.”

On Oct. 7, Gateway — which is owned by Acer, which introduced an AIO in August and a touchscreen notebook in October — introduced a ZX Series of AIO desktops with touchscreens and Windows 7. Packed with features, the ZX Series includes a 20-inch-display model starting at $750, and a 23-incher starting at $1,400.

And on Oct. 20, Apple introduced two updated versions of its iMac AIO, though instead of putting touch on the screen, it incorporated it into the mouse. Called Magic Mouse, it’s the first with multitouch.

Hewlett-Packard is taking still a third approach to touch.

“HP seems to be taking a bigger-picture view in leveraging touch as an interface for PCs, beginning with inclusion of touchscreen displays in its TouchSmart line of PCs in 2006,” states the report. “HP’s direction for touch recognizes that it is becoming a new way to interface with the PC, and that new ways to compute and access or manipulate data are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”

Other notable AIO announcements this year, according to NPD, came from, or will arrive before the holidays, from Dell’s Studio 19 and Lenovo’s IdeaCentre, as well as from Asus, BenQ, Fujitsu, MSI, Sony and ViewSonic.

“This wave of new AIO products was targeting entry-level price points for desktop PCs until LCD panel prices rose in the second half of 2009,” said Chris Connery, a vice president with the DisplaySearch research firm under the NPD umbrella. “Many of these products have been repositioned to emphasize the enhanced features of Windows 7; lower-priced AIO products, including [netbooks], may emerge in 2010.”

NPD’s growth projections for AIOs additionally take into account increasingly price-conscious U.S. consumers, China’s first-time PC buyers and new form factors for emerging markets.

Dell Latitude XT2 XFR Tablet Is Thin, Rugged

2009-10-27T10:58:00.001-07:00

Dell says its new Latitude XT2 XFR — which shares components with its Latitude XT2 tablet — is the industry’s thinnest 12.1-inch rugged convertible tablet.

Dell has released what it says is the industry’s thinnest 12.1-inch rugged convertible tablet, the Latitude XT2 XFR. Designed for physically demanding vertical markets such as military, police, field service, factory fulfillment and first responders, the new tablet extends Dell’s mobile solution portfolio, which includes the Latitude E6400 XFR and semi-rugged E6400 ATG laptops.

The Dell XT2 XFR can perform in temperatures from 140 to negative 10 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s compression-sealed to protect against moisture and dust, and Dell soon expects an MIL-810G rating, which is related to the amount of multi-axis shaking the device can withstand.

“The typical tablet wasn’t prepared for dust or wind — or cheese powder or chocolate sauce,” David Lord, a Dell senior manager, told eWEEK, further indicating Dell’s expected customer base. For those who “need to be able to wash it off at the end of the day, we’ve taken the functionality of XT2 tablet and fused it with the ruggedness of XFR.”

The new XFR, which Dell announced Oct. 27, is 1.5 inches thick, weighs 5.4 pounds and features an impact-resistant, sunlight-viewable 12.1-inch LED display that’s multi-touch enabled. It also runs Microsoft’s Windows 7, which Lord says enabled Dell to offer enhanced functionality, such as not only using four-finger touch to manipulate photos and other items but using touch for various commands.

The XFR features a choice of several Intel Core 2 Duo processors and up to 5GB of DDR3 (double data rate 3), 1,066MHz memory. There are four-, six- and nine-cell battery options, and security features include a fingerprint reader and Dell’s ControlVault, for protecting passwords, biometric templates and security codes safe, and ControlPoint interface for management across multiple applications.

There’s an optional, hot-swappable module coming soon for GPS and a 2-megapixel “sliver,” says Lord, that attaches to the bottom of the device, enabling the screen to act as a camera or viewfinder.

Connectivity options include mobile broadband, 802.11 a/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1.

“We are listening and delivering purpose-engineered products based on unique usage models within customers’ environments,” said Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Business Client Product group, in a statement.

“The Latitude XT2 XFR is a perfect example where feedback told us that customers needed the innovative functionality of the Latitude XT2 with the ability to perform in rugged environments.”

Lord says the XT2 XFR is also another example of Dell’s building “specialty or purpose-built solutions” for particular markets, which is a goal of the company’s. In May, for example, Dell introduced the Latitude 2100 netbook to the K-12 education market. The ruggedized netbook comes with an easy-to-grip case, an anti-microbial keyboard and the option of a rolling cart that can house and simultaneously charge a classroom’s worth of device, while also enabling them to be remotely managed by an IT department.

The rugged XT2 XFR will be available in the United States, Canada, France, Spain, the U.K., Germany and Italy, with pricing starting at $3,599.

Lenovo IdeaPad, IdeaCentre PCs Grow with Intel, Windows 7

2009-10-27T10:56:00.002-07:00

Lenovo introduced three new IdeaPad laptops and IdeaCentre desktops, all with Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Intel processors and encompassing a variety of price points and features. The new PCs should increase Lenovo’s consumer offerings.

Lenovo is rolling out three new IdeaPad laptops and three IdeaCentre desktops, all of which feature Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, new Intel processors and Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience for Windows 7, which the company developed with Microsoft in order to offer faster boot-up and shutdown times, as well as multimedia features and maintenance tools.

“Our idea products are designed with the user experience in mind — every aspect of product design and technology is engineered to improve how consumers seamlessly use these products to enrich their daily lives,” said Liu Jun, a Lenovo senior vice president, in a Oct. 26 statement.

The three new IdeaPads are the U150, U550 and Y550P.

The IdeaPad Y550P is the most powerful laptop in Lenovo’s consumer portfolio and is the company’s first to feature the Intel Core i7 processor with Intel Turbo Boost Technology, which is said to automatically speed up the processor when additional performance is needed. Additional features include Nvidia discrete graphics, a 15.6-inch HD widescreen display, Dolby Home Theater surround sound and a touch-sensitive SlideNav bar above the keyboard for more quickly navigating documents and between programs. It’s priced at $1,149.

The very portable IdeaPad U150 is 0.5-inches thick, weighs 3 pounds and features an 11.6-inch HD widescreen display. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo, and up to 8GB of DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory is supported. An Active Protection System protects the hard drive, when the laptop is bumped or dropped, and a OneKey Rescue System performs data backups scans for viruses before the operating system loads. Available in red or black, the U150 will retail for $585.

The final new laptop, intended to offer a balance between home and office, is the IdeaPad U550. It’s just under an inch thick and features a 15.6-inch HD widescreen display and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The discrete graphics card can be easily turned on and off, to extend battery life, and there’s an integrated fingerprint reader and VeriFace facial recognition software for password-free login. There’s also a DVD drive for accessing and sharing content, a Dolby Sound Room sound system and an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts the screen’s brightness to its environment. The U550 is priced at $650.

Among Lenovo’s new desktops the IdeaCentre H230 is the most value-minded. At $449, it offers a range of hard drive and DDR3 memory configurations, plus integrated tools such as Lenovo Rescue System software for data recovery.

The IdeaCentre K300 is optimized for power and control, which means it includes high-performance RAID-configured hard drives, Lenovo’s Power Control Switch, for adjusting the machine’s power and efficiency, and an Intel Core 2 Quad processor. It’s priced at $499.

And finally the beast of the bunch is the B500, which features a 23-inch HD screen and JBL integrated speakers. There’s an Intel Core 2 Quad processor, discrete graphics, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and 1TB of HDD storage space. Ideal for gamers, its 4-in-1 remote control can be used as a controller for driving games, and there’s a Voice over IP (VoIP) handset, wireless mouse, media remote and a CamSuite for controlling the webcam’s focus and special effects.

On top of its six-strong new lineup, Lenovo announced that its IdeaPad U350 can now be purchased in a “brown lizard print, white lamb skin print and red light weave” for $649. Additionally, it has given its S10-2 netbook a visual lift and is now offering it in, according to Lenovo, “pop art, violet floral, red floral, green floral, phoenix, garden, sailing and origami” designs for $349.

Recession Continues to Take Its Toll on the Market, Even Server Virtualization, Although There Are Signs of Recovery as Customer Adoption Expands, Acc

2009-10-27T10:56:00.001-07:00

According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, 16.5% of all new servers shipped in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09) were virtualized, an increase from 14.5% in 2Q08. However, actual shipments decreased 21.0% year over year to 246,000 physical servers in 2Q09 as customers continue to limit spending on new server hardware relative to last year. Similarly, worldwide virtualization software revenue declined 18.7% year over year in 2Q09 to $344 million. Virtualization licenses did grow quarter over quarter in 2Q09. The server virtualization market continues to shift towards the use of paid hypervisors, with paid virtualization software now running on 60.8% of all new server hardware shipments virtualized in 2Q09, an increase over 57.2% in 2Q08.

"In the second quarter, IDC observed a number of signs indicating that stability is beginning to take hold in the worldwide server market," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. "The worldwide server installed base has aged significantly and virtual machine densities on these systems have increased sharply over the past year. As a result, the market is poised for the beginning of a significant infrastructure refresh cycle in the months ahead. IDC believes that virtualization will be a cornerstone technology as medium and large enterprise organizations around the globe accelerate the need for more dynamic and converged infrastructure designed to support the business needs of the next economic cycle."

Server Virtualization Maturity Signals Changing Behaviors and Buying Intentions

“Server virtualization has forever changed how customers manage their datacenters,” said Michelle Bailey, research vice president of Datacenter Trends at IDC. “'Virtualization First’ is now the default approach for new server deployments at most enterprise IT organizations and is quickly becoming the foundational platform for cloud computing initiatives among service providers. Additionally, growth in emerging regions is accelerating as the economic downturn limits the ability of organizations to raise capital. The next phase in virtualization will require a reinvention of IT policies and procedures and continued adoption of automation tools will be key as virtual machine densities rise and customers find themselves facing virtual server sprawl issues.”

Overall New Server Shipments Virtualized Market Standings, by Vendor

Hewlett-Packard held onto the number 1 spot for worldwide new server shipments virtualized with 36% market share. HP's shipments declined 18% year over year in 2Q09 but grew 1% sequentially. These results were driven primarily by its x86 Proliant server business. Dell continues to distance itself from the remainder of the field as the number 2 vendor with its market share growing 9% over 1Q09. Dell’s relatively strong performance was driven by growth of Intel-based x86 servers in a weak market. IBM remained in the third position with 15% market share. IBM achieved 14% sequential growth driven by a solid performance from its converged System p and x86-based servers.

x86 Virtualization License Market Standings, by Virtualization Platform

VMware continues to hold the number 1 (VMware ESX) and number 2 (VMware Server) virtualization platforms despite revenues declining 22% year over year. This was slightly more than the decline of 21% in total x86 virtualization licenses. Microsoft saw its virtualization license shipments decline 16% year over year, due to the continued depreciation of Virtual Server 2005. However, Hyper-V showed a sharp increase of 54%, one year after its official launch and entrenching itself into 4th place while it cannibalizes itself into the number 3 position, past Virtual Server 2005. Parallels Virtuozzo rounds out the top 5 with license shipments declining 36% year over year. Citrix XenServer showed the largest increase, growing 108% year over year due to the company changing its business model and offering the product for free with certain management functionality. It’s a bold seeding strategy that will see market share gains, but will take some time, if ever, to monetize.

“Despite economic worries, we are seeing the continued increase of paid virtualization platforms, as it now accounts for more than 60% of all x86 virtualization license shipments,” said Brett Waldman, research analyst for System Software at IDC. “This is due to the maturation of virtualization deployments and the need for greater control with higher quality, fine grained management tools as IT departments continue to strive towards internal cloud computing environments.”

IDC's Server Virtualization Taxonomy

Virtualization licenses represents the amount of virtualization platform shipments for a given vendor in a given quarter. New server shipments virtualized maps the amount of virtualization platforms shipments that are sold directly by the hardware vendors. Virtualized server revenue represents the hardware revenue of new server shipments virtualized. Virtualization software revenue represents the software revenue associated with virtualization platform sales.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global server market on a quarterly basis. The Tracker includes quarterly virtualization license shipments, new server shipments virtualized, virtualized server revenue and virtualization software revenue, segmented by region, cpu type, vendor, form factor, sockets, virtualization platform, and primary guest operating system. For more information, please contact Hoang Nguyen at 508-935-4718 or hnguyen@idc.com.

Liquidware Labs Launches Stratusphere 4.5 - Providing Support for VMware View 4, Citrix XenDesktop and Windows 7

2009-10-27T10:55:00.002-07:00

Liquidware Labs Inc. (LWL), the leader in User Experience Management for next generation desktops, today announced the availability of version 4.5 of its’ flagship product, Stratusphere, and the award of its’ fourth patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

LWL is seeing a huge upsurge in the deployments of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and hosted virtual desktops (HVD) based on its award-winning assessment and service level assurance solution Stratusphere. The latest 4.5 version includes significant feature enhancements to enable businesses to thoroughly understand what they have, what they’re using, and what they need to move to VDI; including:

• Support for VMware View 4, Citrix XenDesktop 4, Microsoft Windows® 7
• Integration of ProfileUnity in the Stratusphere Hub – LWL’s profile management and user configuration solution
• New and powerful assessment and diagnostic dashboards
• Query driven analytic reports, trend analysis and capacity planning
• Correlation of user, desktop OS and VMware ESX Server performance metrics
• Plug-in to allow dynamic query from within Excel (or any other 3rd party tool that supports ODBC)
• Publically available evaluation download

“Many of the largest, next generation VDI deployments include Stratusphere as part of the solution to drive the most optimal user experience and guarantee service level assurances. We continue to provide superior levels of granularity in our Stratusphere product to allow organizations to assess and diagnose both their physical and virtual desktop environments alike. Stratusphere allows you to “right-size” your infrastructure for VDI and next generation desktop designs – both from the user and application perspective – bringing cost-savings to organizations and serious productivity gains to users,” commented Jason E. Smith, vice president product marketing, LWL. “Combined with our latest patent, we continue to innovate in the VDI/HVD space.”

The latest patent awarded to LWL from the US Patent Office (number 7,591,001 issued September 15th) covers LWL’s innovation that embeds the health status of a Connector ID™ key enabled machine into each packet. This health status is established by comparing the existing configuration, usage or performance of the Connector ID enabled machines (either physical or virtual) to previously defined IT policies. Stratusphere can provide real-time audits of the health status of these machines using the network, along with controlling how machines connect to the network or to specific servers and applications based on their health status.

Certeon Adds Future Com as a Strategic Reseller of Its aCelera Virtual Appliance for WAN Optimization

2009-10-27T10:55:00.001-07:00

optimization and application acceleration, today announces it has added Future Com as a reseller of Certeon’s aCelera Virtual Appliance. Future Com is a supported provider of network security solutions, representing customized best fit solutions to suit any of today’s networking needs.

Future Com is committed to providing clients with high performance, cost-effective and flexible networking solutions. Adding aCelera to its wide array of networking solutions was a direct response to customer requests. As a software-based solution for WAN optimization, aCelera provides Future Com customers with the level of flexibility and scalability demanded in today’s virtual environment.

aCelera virtual appliance software products are the perfect union of virtualization and application acceleration technology, providing businesses with performance, scalability, and easy management. By utilizing aCelera, Future Com customers will be able to maximize application acceleration for all traffic with performance enhancements for mission-critical applications and business continuity environments, improving network bandwidth optimization and performance by more than 95 percent. When compared to proprietary hardware appliances, aCelera software saves IT departments up to 60 percent in capital and operations costs.

“At Future Com, we pride ourselves on listening to our customers and doing all that we can to provide a solution that directly meets their needs,” states Douglas Hollenshead, CEO & President, Future Com. “Following several requests, we looked to Certeon to help Future Com deliver top quality application acceleration, and with aCelera, our customers can experience a solution that makes better use of their current resources and ensures the highest returns for their IT networking investments.”

“Our commitment to embracing the move to virtualization and developing cost-effective and innovative products complements Future Com’s vision of delivering value-added business solutions to their customers,” states Peter Dougherty, Co-founder and President, Certeon Inc. “Our aCelera virtual appliance enables Future Com’s customers to take advantage of their current resources without any heavy proprietary hardware upgrades.”

Certeon was the first vendor to introduce a truly virtualized WAN optimization and application acceleration solution. Certeon’s aCelera virtual appliance software enables the reduction in remote application response time, increased scalability, and lower IT costs. Certeon’s newly introduced aCelera Sync software is the industry’s first virtual appliance that also dramatically accelerates disaster recovery for the business continuity market, without requiring costly proprietary hardware appliances.

Mellanox Advances IBM Networking Solutions with 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Cards

2009-10-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced its ConnectX® EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards are now available directly from IBM for the company’s IBM System Cluster 1350™ and iDataPlex systems. With industry-leading performance, power efficiency, integration and feature-set, ConnectX-enabled servers and storage systems provide an optimized solution for high-transaction databases, financial services, cloud computing and virtualized server and storage data center environments.

“Mellanox is pleased to provide its leading ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions through IBM, to enable IT managers with the most efficient, flexible and high-performance Ethernet solution,” said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The combination of Mellanox’s ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters and IBM System Cluster 1350 and iDataPlex systems enables end-users to improve their business results while reducing data center infrastructure power and to maximize their return on investment.”

“Customers in a broad range of enterprise computing environments, with applications such as database clusters, grid systems, cloud computing and server virtualization are working with ever more complex data sets requiring 10 Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth,” said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Mellanox 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters provide our customers with a solution that effectively scales and provides the high efficiency required for green and cloud computing.”

Mellanox’s ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters provide the required flexibility and efficiency to enable true I/O consolidation for virtualized and enterprise data centers. ConnectX EN provides line rate and very low-latency and supports all the stateless offload features, virtualization accelerations, Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Mellanox ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters support a broad array of major operating systems including Windows, Linux, VMware ESX 4.0, Citrix XenServer and FreeBSD.

Availability

Mellanox ConnectX EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters are available today through the IBM website at www.ibm.com.

Intel Introduces New Core i7, i5 Processors

2009-09-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

After months of whispers, Intel today officially introduced the next major platform for its processors with the introduction of the Core i7 and updates to the Core i7 and Xeon 3400 series for mainstream desktop and entry server markets.

Formerly codenamed "Lynnfield," these new chips are based on Intel's award-winning Nehalem microarchitecture and are designed for consumers who need high-end performance for digital media, productivity, gaming and other demanding applications. These processors, along with the new Intel P55 express chipset, are available today.

The new Core i7 and i5 processors are the first Intel processors to integrate both a 16-lane PCI Express 2 graphics port and two-channel memory controller, enabling all input/output and manageability functions to be handled by the single-chip Intel P55 Express Chipset. Previous Intel chipsets required two separate chips – a northbridge and a southbridge.

Check out our three feature articles today for the full scoop:
Intel Core i5 And Core i7: Intel’s Mainstream Magnum Opus
In Theory: How Does Lynnfield's On-Die PCI Express Affect Gaming?
Core i5, Core i7, CrossFire, And SLI: Gaming Paradise, Redux?

Phoenix BIOS Boots in 1 Second, Loads Win 7

2009-09-27T18:45:00.002-07:00

One difference between many consumer electronics and the PC is the time it takes from hitting the power button until it's fully functional.

PCs have had to contend with far more complexities in its system, as well as slower storage media such as hard disk drives. While much of that we have to live with, the advent of faster storage solutions such as SSDs make the wait from power-to-desktop shorter.

Now Phoenix has created a new BIOS that will boot (or POST) a PC in just one second. Such a quick boot process means that it can shave a significant portion of the total load time of a cold system, with the rest of the wait being the loading of the operating system.

Phoenix demonstrated its technology on a Lenovo T400s equipped with an SSD. Just one second after the system was powered on, the drive access light began to flicker and a clean Windows 7 was loaded to the desktop in about 10 seconds.

Check out a video of the technology in action at LaptopMag.

Toshiba to detail Cell-based TV in early October

2009-09-27T18:45:00.001-07:00

Toshiba will soon unveil its first television based on the Cell processor, the same multimedia chip that sits at the heart of the PlayStation 3 game console.

Toshiba has been showing prototypes of the television with Cell technology for the last couple of years and its unveiling on Oct. 5 will come just before its first public showing at the upcoming Ceatec electronics show. While a launch date has not yet been announced, the timing of the unveiling suggests it will be on sale in Japan before the end of this year.

The Cell chip was developed by Toshiba, IBM and Sony and each chip contains a single Power PC core and eight co-processors. Together the chips make heavy-duty processing of video a breeze.

During previous demonstrations of Cell TV prototypes, Toshiba has put the chip to use providing real-time enhancing of standard definition to a quality closer to that of high definition. It has also been shown streaming multiple chapters from a recorded TV show, similar to the multiscreen menus on some DVDs, to make program navigation easier.

But for all the neat tricks the Cell chip can do with video there's one thing it almost certainly won't do: run PlayStation 3 games. Toshiba has said several times that it has no intention of offering any sort of PlayStation compatibility in a Cell-based TV.

As complaints roll in about iPhone MMS, AT&T says activation went smoothly

2009-09-27T18:44:00.001-07:00

AT&T activated Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) on Apple Inc's iPhone 3G and 3GS phones starting mid-day Friday nationwide, with some early users reporting transmission problems on AT&T's Facebook page.

It wasn't clear how significant or widespread any of the problems were early on, however. Some experts have wondered how well AT&T's network will perform with the added network load from pictures and other media sent via iPhones.

Complaints on AT&T's Facebook page ranged from taking 15 to 20 minutes to send a photo wirelessly, to having an MMS transmission halt part-way through. Others said MMS service was up but then dropped out on a later attempt.

However, despite the complaints, an AT&T spokesman said MMS was working: "We said we'd have MMS working today and it is," said AT&T's Mark Siegel at 5 p.m. ET, several hours after activation began. "From what we can see, it's going smoothly."

While many comments were critical of the service of the hundreds that were quickly posted just hours after the turn-on, many others on AT&T's Facebook page were also positive about the new MMS capability.

Jeff Neves in Sacramento reported the service was "working great" at about 4:40 p.m. ET, adding: "I'm doing my part to help CRASH the network!!"

The MMS activation through iTunes required the phones to have an iPhone OS 3.1 update installed, a fact that some customers apparently had missed.

Some early commenters reported problems of not being able to send MMS data at all, while others noted delays in sending pictures wirelessly.

Joey Edison reported on the AT&T Facebook page that sending a picture to a coworker shortly after 4 p.m. ET and said the co-worker hadn't received it 15 minutes later. "Fifteen minutes later, really? Maybe it's because we're obsessing and taking up all the data!"

Tamim Sekander wrote at about 4:20 ET: "Working good in Dallas, but to receive one, it's like 20 minutes to get it."

Another comment from James Rosenberg in Des Moines, Iowa, at about 4:20 ET said the network was "down hard," with no ability to send pictures.

Yet others commenters said they could start to send a picture and find it would stop transmitting about three-fourths of the way through.

Some experts said that MMS messages don't always get through on other networks and other devices because of interoperability problems between networks.

Some who couldn't get MMS to work properly urged other customers to complain and seek refunds, while others complained that iPhone still needed the ability to tether their phones to laptops for wireless transmissions.

Sony brings out a big-screen, general-purpose entertainment laptop with a budget-friendly price

2009-09-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

Forget playing games, how about a semi-stylish 15.5-inch widescreen notebook that's built with movies in mind? If this sounds appealing to you, then check out the Sony VAIO VGN-NW125J. For $800, this model offers up a decent experience--and a whole lot of software (some of it even useful).

The big selling points on the stickers scream: "HDMI-output (cable sold separately)!" and "A Stunning LCD!" That's as good a cue as any to tackle some of the multimedia claims for the VGN-NW125J. The 1366-by-768-pixel panel delivers good results on the 15.5-inch screen. Blue colors popped a little when you set the brightness to full blast (and tilt the screen back to a 45-degree viewing angle), but at midlevel brightness and contrast settings, the machine seems a little muted. Its glossy coating doesn't really help matters because it picks up a glare. Trying to watch episodes of Lost streamed over Hulu requires a little more monkeying with contrast than I'm accustomed to, but at least the effort pays off in the end.

Plug the NW125J into an HDTV set through the HDMI port and you can actually get a decent picture from the on-board DVD-ROM drive. Yeah, and that'd be one of my complaints. I know that Sony is trying to keep prices down, but for less than 100 bucks more, you can invest in Sony's VGN-NW180J/S that comes with a Blu-ray drive. Y'know, Sony's own home video format that the company is desperately trying to push on consumers.

On the audio side, the sound isn't exactly full--or cubemate-annoyingly loud. But it is crisp enough and even throws in some of that psuedo-spatial-sound tomfoolery to make it seem more "3D." However, the absence of good bass makes it a little hollow when you listen to Jack caterwauling about wanting to get off, and then back, on the island. In short, it's good for a base-level all-purpose machine, but not great.

For such a big notebook, I found myself hitting the wrong keys a disproportionate amount of the time. Are the keys comfortable? Yes, the cut-out buttons feel springy enough when you're typing--they are plenty large as well. It's even hard to find fault with the function buttons and the few shortcut keys that line the top row (buttons for quick Web launching, muting, and display toggling). I think the problem lies in the spacing of the keys. Though the NW125J is big and wide, the keys feel scrunched a little too tightly. About one and a half inches are on either side of the keypad--not a major gripe, more an observation.

Sony scores back a couple of brownie points by loading this laptop up with every major port or slot you're likely to want: three for USB and one each for HDMI-out (as mentioned earlier), VGA-out, FireWire, PC Express, and Memory Stick and SD cards.

Deeper in the guts, the 2.GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 CPU and 4GB of RAM should be enough to muscle through basic tasks and provide a little extra oomph, but they won't break any land-speed records. The NW125J winds up with a WorldBench 6 score of 80; a similarly loaded, and similarly priced, Gateway U7807u scored 84 in WorldBench 6 a while back, so the new Sony's score is a little disappointing. The lackluster, integrated GPU ensures that you won't be aiming much higher than casual games on this laptop (not a bad thing). As for its endurance, it's able to last 4 hours, 13 minutes in our battery drain tests. In other words it's a fairly average machine, able to last as long as most all-purpose machines already out there--the NW125J just tries doing it for less.

The software bundle looks promising for the most part, with only a couple of dogs in the mix. On the utilitarian side, you have the fairly vanilla VAIO Control Center that parks everything you'd need to tweak on the PC in one place. The SmartWi (for wizards) utility is a little goofy and caused more confusion than help. (Let me interject a little anecdote: I'm trying to set up a wireless connection and the Wireless wizard asks me to....plug in....an ethernet cable! Really?)

The boatload of multimedia-minded apps range from the not-bad to the not-needed. On the positive side: Roxio Easy CD Creator 10 and a couple of basic video- and photo-editing apps are the headliners, but here's something that had potential: the VAIO Content Exporter. Of course, it's only optimized to export content to three settings: PSP, Memory Stick, and Mylo. Would it kill Sony to acknowledge that other devices exist? Another dark-horse app worth noting is the PMB. It lets you manage and organize videos and pictures. A handy calendar view lets you put all your pictures in perspective. The biggest disappointment: The basic MusicBox is a prime example of trying to remake the wheel without rounding the edges. (I know that Sony wants to put its stamp on music software, but do we really need it at this point?)

The NW125J is an oversized and promising machine that does what it says: That is, give your kids the basics they need for the new school year along with a mild multimedia boot in the keister. But with limitations like the lack of a discrete GPU, I'm wondering if Sony could have made a couple of smarter moves to keep the price down at the $800 level.

Other laptops specially configured for retail sale at Best Buy include the Dell Studio 14z, the HP dv4-1465dx, and the Toshiba Satellite M505-S4940. And check out our video coverage of the four laptops from Best Buy in "Back-to-School Laptops: We Review Best Buy's Exclusives."

Take HP's Mini 1000 netbook, but make it less expensive and a little thicker. That, in a nutshell, is HP's Mini 110.

2009-09-27T18:41:00.002-07:00

What do you do when you already have a couple of well-received netbooks? You make another one, of course. And sure as Shadrach, HP is following up on the success of its consumer-friendly Mini 1000 and business-centric Mini 2140 netbooks (not to mention its designer-minded Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam) with the HP Mini 110.

The big difference between the new model and its predecessors is a couple hundred bucks. Available since June of this year, the Mini 110 XP (available in "Black Swirl") sells for $329, while the Linux-based 110 Mi edition starts at $279. Compare those prices with the $549 tag on the Mini 1000 that we reviewed last fall.

The hardware hasn't changed too much: The Mini 110 carries the same N270 Atom CPU, the same 1GB of RAM, the same 160GB hard drive, the same awesomely large 92-percent-of-full-size keyboard--even the same crummy mouse button layout that's been driving me bonkers since HP introduced it on the HP Mini 2133. The new model also comes loaded with a three-cell battery--as did the Mini 1000, which achieved a mediocre battery life of 2 hours, 47 minutes on a charge. In our tests, the Mini 110 survived for 1 minute longer. (Travelers' advisory: Consider popping an extra 40 bones for the BX06 Mini Battery, to pick up a little extra on-the-go gusto.) That's miles hours behind pack leaders such as the Toshiba NB205-310, which posted a magnificent 10-hour run-time. On our WorldBench 6 test suite, the Mini 110 unsurprisingly notched a mark of 33--a hair better than the Mini 1000's original score of 30.

What do you gain and what do you lose with this more affordable model? Well, HP swaps out the multimedia dongle port in favor of a built-in VGA port (plus a built-in RJ-45 ethernet jack for good measure). The sweet-looking speaker grille planted inside the 1000's hinge is absent from the 110, replaced by a horrid-sounding speaker mounted beneath the display. That display offers a 10.1-inch-diagonal image with a native resolution of 1024 by 576, and the slick edge-to-edge plastic cover has has vanished in favor of a big plastic bezel that makes the Mini 110 look like the love child of the Mini 1000 and the Acer Aspire One.

Upgrade options exist, naturally: 802.11b/g not enough, and you want wireless WAN? Done. Wish you could get this netbook in "White Swirl" or "Pink Chic"? It's yours, for a price. Feeling cramped? You can slot in a 250GB hard drive and boost the RAM to 2GB.

I also appreciate the Mini 110's software selection, which is slightly more robust than the usual feeble bloatware. For instance, Syncables allows you to sync five PCs on a network.

Otherwise, this looks like a slightly thicker, economy-class version of last year's model. The 110 measures 10.3 by 6.6 by 1.2 inches and weighs 2.33 pounds, compared to the Mini 1000's 10.3 by 6.6 by 0.99 inches and 2.25 pounds. And that isn't a bad trade-off when you consider the extras inside the machine--and the lower price.

And really, that's what the Mini 110 boils down to: an econobox that delivers just enough of what you need, without spoiling you. You get all the required ports, plus a little extra beef, for a very low price. Not worried about saving maximum money on your next netbook? The HP Mini 5101 does a stand-up job, but neither it nor the Mini 110 can match the value that the Toshiba NB205-310 offers.

Samsung's upscale netbook is almost as bulky as a standard laptop, without the full features.

2009-09-27T18:41:00.001-07:00

Netbooks are all the rage these days, and some companies, like Dell, are practically giving them away.
So of course, someone's bound to bulk up a netbook. The 10-inch screens that max out at 1024-by-600 resolution seem just too restrictive. And how about throwing in better battery life, too?

That's the thinking behind Samsung's $549 NP-NC20. The 12.1-inch screen offers a full 1280 by 800 pixels--enough for true 720p high-definition playback. The good news is that playback of DVDs and 720p high-def movies does look pretty good, and the frame rate is fairly smooth. The display, while adequate, won't win awards for color fidelity or contrast. Black levels and viewing angles are the limiting factors, given that this panel seems to be a 6-bits-per-pixel TN type.

Unfortunately, the NP-NC20's display, like those of many current laptops, has one of those glossy-finish screens that make reading and viewing media difficult when there's any glare whatsoever. By comparison, two other netbooks currently host 12-inch displays: Lenovo's IdeaPad S12 and the HP Pavilion dv2 (HP's machine is technically a tweener-class netbook/notebook).

The bad news: Audio is pretty poor through the speakers, and why would you want to lug this around just to play movies? I say "lug" because this machine is a little weighty. With the power brick, it's 4.1 pounds. And it measures closer in size to a laptop than many netbooks--11.6 by 8.5 by 1.5 inches. To be fair, the NC-20 has a lot of things going for it. That extra girth enables a more robust keyboard layout, making typing less of a chore than on some netbooks. However, you have to press the function (Fn) key when using Home or End--keys often used in word processing or browsing the Web. The trackpad is a little wonky as well. It's got a single button; press the button on the left side, and it's a left mouse button; press it on the right side, and you get a context click. But it's easy to get it wrong if you strike near the center of the bar. I'd have preferred two distinct buttons.

All the I/O ports are on the two sides, not buried in the rear. One USB, VGA, audio, and ethernet port each grace the left side, while the right panel contains two more USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington lock slot, and the power connector. The SD card slot is recessed slightly under a lip in the front, but is still readily accessible. That's about it. Nothing mind-blowing or new compared to what's already on the market.

Performance is a different matter. The Via Nano processor seemed to chug a bit if we opened up more than about six tabs in Firefox 3.5. Word 2007 also ran pretty slowly, with visible stuttering through scrolling of large documents. It's odd that DVD playback is crisp and smooth, while scrolling a Word or Excel file is on the slow side. And you wouldn't want to run any games on this, even though the built-in S3 Chrome graphics is theoretically DirectX 9-capable. Some older games may run, but there's just not enough main memory after allocating 128MB for graphics.

But let's put all that in a little bit of perspective here. The average netbook, powered by an Intel Atom CPU, scores about 36 in our WorldBench 6 tests. The NC-20 clocks a 41. Hardly a speed demon, but a slight clip faster. As for battery life, it survives for 5 hours, 53 minutes on a charge, which is toward the higher end of the netbook spectrum. (To date, Toshiba's NB205-310, with its nearly 10-hour battery life, has yet to be unseated.)

Given that you can buy a Lenovo IdeaPad G530 notebook for $499--$50 less than price of this netbook--I have to question the overall utility of the NC-20. Just ask yourself: Why bother with a netbook, when I can get a full-featured laptop that's a little heavier but costs less? If you're hell-bent on a 12-inch screen, consider Lenovo's IdeaPad S12 (an nVidia Ion-based version is due out soon) or HP's pricier--and more potent--Pavilion dv2.

This tightly integrated package is great for on-the-go office and Web use, but not for multimedia.

2009-09-27T18:36:00.000-07:00

The Lenovo IdeaPad U350 is one of those rare products where actually using it makes it seem much stronger than its test results and feature set might make it seem on paper. This first hits you when, after you fire up and start typing, you realize that the keyboard is actually--dare I say it?--usable for touch typists. The LED-backlit, 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel screen appears more than adequate for typical office use and even light-duty photo editing. What you get is a decent ultraportable machine at a pretty reasonable price (our unit, as configured sells for $749).

Performance is about what you should expect for a unit sporting the Intel U2700 ultra-low-voltage, single-core CPU. The WorldBench 6 score of 54 is just a tad under that of the slightly more expensive MSI X340, despite the latter's faster CPU. Certainly the 4GB of DDR3-1066 SDRAM helps overall performance--and is a step above what you get in netbooks and the AMD Athlon Neo-based tweener, the HP Pavilion dv2--but this IdeaPad is no barn-burner.

Battery life is par for its 2700-mAH (milli-Amp-Hour) battery, at 4 hours, 32 minutes. This compares favorably with the MSI X340, which has a 2150-mAH battery, and gets only 3 hours, 42 minutes on our battery life tests. The Acer Timeline we recently reviewed arrived with a 5160-mHz battery, so it ran for a full work day (8 hours, 21 minutes).

Despite the single-core processing, multitasking performance seemed snappy; the 4GB of RAM certainly helps. We had Firefox open with about a dozen tabs (some with performance-sapping flash video playing) and TweetDeck running in the background, all while scrolling through a large Adobe Acrobat document. Overall responsiveness appeared to hold up well in that environment.

Wi-Fi performance did seem a little slower on our 802.11n network than Wi-Fi on other, similar laptops. Transferring a 4.5GB video took a little longer than we'd normally expect. This didn't seem to affect Web browsing or normal Internet usage, however.

The IdeaPad isn't as thin as MSI's unit, though, nor is it as light. Yet the unit felt lighter than its 3.6 pounds (sans power brick.) It helps that the IdeaPad's weight distribution seems very even, so you can just grab it from any angle without awkwardness. Display output ports (VGA and HDMI) are on the left side, along with one USB 2.0 port, gigabit ethernet, and the Kensington lock slot. The right side houses the pair of audio ports (one in and one out), two more USB 2.0 parts and a slot that supports SD, xD, and Memory Stick flash memory cards.

While the Lenovo seems ideal for general office work and some photo editing, its multimedia capabilities seem more limited. We noticed visible aliasing with DVD-quality video scaled to the full resolution of the display. Vertical viewing angles are very poor--just a slight shift above or below the ideal viewing angle results in nearly unwatchable visual quality. The built-in speakers are pretty bad, too, so you'll want to use headphones.

The U350's software includes Adobe Acrobat Reader 9, Lenovo's own Webcam utilities, and RealNetworks game trialware, plus a trial version of Lenovo's own Carbonite online backup utility. No security or antivirus software is included, however. Documentation is adequate, if a little thin, but well written and easy to follow.

In the end, the Lenovo IdeaPad U350 offers a fairly standard feature set with average performance, but it's all built into a nicely integrated, slick-feeling package that makes it a real joy to use as an adjunct to an office desktop. Just don't expect to watch a lot of movies on it.

D-Link DSM-210

2009-09-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

As one would expect from D-Link, a company known for its networking products, its DSM-210 10-inch digital picture frame is Wi-Fi enabled, and it also have 10/100 Ethernet support. The 800-by-480 pixel resolution frame comes with snap-on white or black borders; I preferred the black, which give the frame a modern look. The DSM-210 doesn't really resemble a traditional picture frame, however; it looks far more like a tech gadget. But sadly, some of this frame's limitations will be problematic for techies and non-techies alike.

The frame has memory card slots for SD, MMC, and Memory Stick, and it also has a USB port for plugging in a USB flash drive. When I loaded my test photos to the DSM-210, the images transferred very slowly to the frame's 1GB internal memory--the DSM-210 only allows you to copy pictures one by one. The only way to copy multiple images at a time is by using a software widget, which is for Windows only. (The DSM-210 can also read images off a Windows PC on a network, but not a Mac.)

Once the images were loaded, the displayed pictures had a slightly desaturated look with a cool cast. The screen is bright and can be viewed from different angles without losing image visibility, but no brightness or contrast controls are available. The slide show ran smoothly, and you can choose from multiple transition effects, but the frame has limited slide-interval adjustments. Also, it cannot handle nested folders, or run images from multiple cards and internal memory into one show.

The DSM-210 allows you to stream photos (but unfortunately, not video) through FrameChannel, an RSS utility. Oddly, the default settings are limited to a meager five photos. It's as if D-Link were conspiring to limit the number of pages in your virtual photo album. In addition, as with the multimedia cards, the frame cannot stream content from more than one channel at a time (meaning only Picasa, or only Flickr, or other service). This may not be an issue for those who don't use more than one image-sharing network, but it is another unexpected limitation.

One pretty cool feature on this frame is motion detection: The device will power off when no one is around, thus conserving energy and the frame's lifespan. I also liked that you can receive pictures via e-mail on the frame.

Macworld's buying advice

The DSM-210 has some good features, but a lot of compromises are made within those features. If all you want to do is simply display pictures, you should be able to find a 10-inch frame at a more affordable price. The streaming and Internet access features can be found on other frames without the limitations found on the DSM-210.

Modern Combat: Sandstorm FPS Game Comes to IPhone

2009-09-04T07:53:00.002-07:00

Gameloft has announced the release of Modern Combat: Sandstorm, a new first person shooter game for the iPhone and iPod touch. It's available for $7 from the App Store.

You're a soldier assigned to Mission Sandstorm, and it's your responsibility to locate and neutralize a new terrorist cell that's mobilizing and recruiting insurgents in a remote desert location.

The game features 10 missions in various locations ranging from city streets to a hospital, sewers, training camp, and more. You will be equipped with authentic weapons like assault rifles and a sniper rifle, RPG, shotgun, submachine gun, and more. The game features a level system that lets you progressively unlock weapons and use munitions you find on the bodies of your enemy. Modern Combat: Sandstorm also sports three different control systems, including tap control and "Virtual Sticks."

System requirements call for an iPhone or iPod touch running iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.

Android OS Developers to Revamp App Marketplace

2009-09-04T07:53:00.001-07:00

In a bid to compete more squarely with Apple's App Store the developers of the Android mobile OS are improving the way people browse for applications on Google phones through what is known as Android Market. As part of a software upgrade (Android 1.6, aka Donut) Android handset owners will be able to browse more easily third-party apps by previewing screen shots of apps and sort apps by criteria such as most popular and newest. There is no official date set for the release of Donut.

Google announced update to Android Market in a blog post late Thursday stating upgrades to its mobile applications store will "improve the overall experience for users." Despite the update, improvements are also likely to irk some Android developers who feel the Android 1.6 doesn't go far enough.

What's New at Android Market

Navigation is key for the tweaked marketplace, which must be viewed on a mobile phone if you want to see the complete store and the new improvements. The main navigation buttons for Apps, Games and Downloads have been moved to the top of the screen, leaving valuable screen space for featured apps. When you are shopping for programs in category view, three buttons at the top of the screen will also let you filter apps by Top Paid, Top Free and Just In.

Other improvements to Android Market include screenshots to get an idea of what a particular application looks like, promotional icons and longer descriptions from developers. There are also four new sub-categories to improve navigation including sports, health, themes and comics.

Cranky Developers Not Satisfied with Update

Google's tweaks come on the heels of recent criticisms over Android Market's profitability for third-party developers. On Monday, the metrics firm Ad Mob released a report claiming Android Market typically produces $5 million in sales every month versus $200 million at the iPhone App Store.

One complaint takes issue with Android Market's payment options and Google's return policy. Currently, all Android users must purchase apps through Google's own payment system Checkout. But according to a recent IDG report some developers would like to see other payment options that users might find more convenient. Developers are also up in arms over Google's 24-hour return policy, which they say makes it too easy for users to return an application after using it for just a few hours. Apple's App Store, by comparison, does not grant refunds for any reason except in cases where a purchased product is not delivered within "a reasonable period."

Microsoft wants people to throw Windows 7 launch parties

2009-09-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

A new version of Windows is not typically a reason to throw a party, but Microsoft is hoping people will do just that to celebrate Windows 7, and has teamed with House Party to help them do so.

Through a House Party promotional Web site, people can apply to throw a Windows 7 launch party any time between Oct. 22 and Oct. 29. Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 globally on Oct. 22.

"You host the party. We'll bring the favors," Microsoft declared on the site calling for applications. House Party is a community-based site that helps people around the world host parties that are usually held on the same day and are focused on a corporate event or product launch.

If chosen to throw a party, hosts will receive a Signature Edition of Windows 7 Ultimate and a Windows 7 Party Pack based on a theme of their choosing to help them organize the party. The themes for the party packs pertain to features of the new OS and, as listed on the Web site, are: PhotoPalooza, Media Mania, Setting up with Ease and Family Friendly Fun.

Every host also has a chance to win a PC worth $750, according to the Web site. Winners will be notified and their prizes delivered after Oct. 30.

Windows 7, which has been in the hands of testers and early adopters, has gotten generally positive reviews. Many say it's the OS Microsoft should have delivered when it released Windows Vista -- an overall disappointment among Windows users -- in early 2007.

Microsoft isn't the first company to ask enthusiasts to throw a geek-themed party in honor of a software launch. Fans of Mozilla's Firefox browser were asked by the company to host download parties when it released Firefox 3 in June. The company hoped to set a Guinness World Record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours, and claimed to log more than 8 million downloads of the browser in a day.

Apple patches critical Java bugs, but leaves Leopard users vulnerable

2009-09-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

Apple today patched 15 vulnerabilities in three versions of Java used by Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard, bringing the operating system up to par with fixes that Sun issued a month ago.

Today's Leopard updates take that OS to the same edition of Java 6 included with Snow Leopard, which Apple shipped last week. At the same time, however, the update doesn't include the very latest Java fixes, which Sun delivered Aug. 11.

According to Apple's advisory, the upgrade patches 15 distinct vulnerabilities in Java, and updates Java 6 to version 1.6.0_15, Java 5 to version 1.5.0_20 and Java 4 to version 1.4.2_22. Sun issued those updates on Aug. 4.

All the vulnerabilities could allow for "arbitrary code execution," Apple-speak for the type of bug attackers can use to plant malicious code on a computer. Although other major software makers, like Microsoft and Oracle, assign threat rankings to their bug fixes, Apple does not. For example, Microsoft dubs the same kind of flaws as "critical."

"Visiting a Web page containing a maliciously crafted untrusted Java applet may lead to arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the current user," Apple said in its advisory, explaining how an attack might work.

The Java update applies only to the client and server editions of Mac OS X 10.5, which are currently at v. 10.5.8. Users still running Mac OS X 10.4, aka Tiger, remain stuck on older versions of Java. Tiger's Java components were last updated by Apple on June 15, when it bumped up Java 5 to 1.5.0_19 and Java 4 to 1.4.2_21.

Although the June update -- which also affected Leopard -- plugged holes that Sun had filled six months earlier, today's update came harder on the heels of Sun's fixes for Windows and Linux. "That's not too bad for Apple, actually," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, in an instant message.

Apple maintains its own versions of Java and is responsible for delivering patches to users. Typically, Apple is slow to patch the problems that Sun fixes, with a six-month lag not unusual. When Apple refreshed Java in September 2008, for example, it fixed more than two-dozen vulnerabilities, some of which had been patched in updates for Java for Windows, Linux and Solaris as far back as March 2008.

Apple has come under fire for its sluggish pace. Last May, for instance, a security researcher angered by the delays posted attack code that exploited one of the then-unfixed Java bugs.

Even with today's updates, however, Leopard still doesn't have the most up-to-date version of Java 6, which is 1.6.0_16. Sun shipped that update Aug. 11.

Snow Leopard, which caught flak this week for shipping a vulnerable version of Flash, also isn't in sync with Sun's latest Java. Computerworld today confirmed that Snow Leopard installs Java 1.6.0_15 during its upgrade, making it on par with today's Leopard update but still one version behind Sun's newest.

The Java security updates, identified as Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 5, can be downloaded manually from Apple, or installed using Mac OS X's integrated update service.

Users can verify that the updates have taken by using the JavaTester.org site created by Computerworld blogger Michael Horowitz.

Oracle delays security updates for user conference

2009-09-04T07:46:00.002-07:00

Oracle database administrators who are worried they might have to skip Oracle's user conference next month to fiddle with security updates can relax. Oracle is cutting them a break and releasing its next set of patches a week later than planned.

The updates, which are released on a set schedule every three months, had been due for release on Oct. 13, slap in the middle of Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. But after thinking things over, Oracle has decided to delay the patches. They're now due on Oct. 20.

Oracle announced the change Thursday on its Web site, saying it was moving the patches back because "many Oracle customers with responsibility for deploying the Critical Patch Update within their respective organizations will be attending Oracle OpenWorld."

The database vendor plans to release its advance notification information, detailing which products will be affected by the updates, a week later than expected too. It's due on Oct. 15.

Admins responsible for Windows systems will still have some work to do during the conference, however. Oct. 13 is the day Microsoft is expected to release its set of security updates for the month.

AT&T sets Sept. 25 for launch of MMS on iPhone 3G, 3GS

2009-09-04T07:46:00.001-07:00

AT&T Inc. today finally set a firm date of Sept. 25 for making multimedia messaging service (MMS) available for the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

The carrier had said at the launch of iPhone 3GS in June that MMS capability would be available by the end of the summer. AT&T went beyond that promise by a few days since autumn begins on Sept. 22.

The MMS will be enabled through a software update that day. A spokeswoman said the MMS service is available through a user's data plan at no extra cost.

The carrier said in an online note that it had to prepare the network for the "record volumes" of MMS traffic expected from iPhone users. The company wants to "ensure an excellent experience from Day One."

AT&T also said in the online note to customers, "We appreciate your patience as we work toward that end."

The carrier also cited an "explosion of traffic" with smartphone usage, and reported wireless usage growth of 350% year-over-year for the past two years. "We want you to know that we're working relentlessly to innovate and invest in our network to anticipate this growth in usage and to stay ahead of the anticipated growth in data demand, new devices and applications for years go come," the note stated.

When Apple announced the 3GS on June 8, crowds jeered when it was mentioned that AT&T would not immediately have MMS available on the shipment date. The delay brought plenty of customer complaints and helped fuel concerns over the value of a carrier having an exclusive deal for a smartphone.

For AT&T, missing the end-of-summer target by a few days was justified by the need to get the network ready. When asked why that target date was missed, a spokeswoman responded in an e-mail: "It was important to us to give our customers a positive experience from day one. We took the time necessary to make sure our network is ready to handle what we expect will be a record volume of MMS traffic. We appreciate our customers' patience and hope they'll understand our desire to get it right from the start."

BMW and Windows 7: Why the car maker is upgrading now

2009-09-04T07:45:00.001-07:00

German automobile maker BMW is many things: Manufacturer of luxury cars and motorcycles; a brand name famous around the world; a giant corporation with a reputation for efficiency.

You can now add Windows 7 early adopter to that list.

The Munich-based car giant, whose headquarters building is considered an architectural icon in Europe, has 100,000 employees in 250 locations in countries such as South Africa, the United States, Canada and China. Within this vast environment, with users ranging from auto engineers to salespeople, sits 85,000 Windows machines.

BMW has been running Windows XP in its broad client environment since 2001. Happy with XP, the automaker passed on Windows Vista, so its planning for Windows 7 started early, says Bernhard Huber, BMW's Head of IT Workplace Systems.

"We identified a lot of functional and monetary benefits of Windows 7 early on," says Huber, adding that BMW first started testing the Windows 7 beta in the first quarter of this year and has increased the number of pilot users since the RTM (release to manufacturing) version of Windows 7 became available in late July.

"It is expected that 200 to 500 key users will participate in the pilot program until the end of 2009," he says.

Huber mentioned that BMW IT will increase compatibility testing with 5,000 users in a production environment in 2010, after which the rollout of Windows 7 on all machines at BMW will begin in 2011, probably around the time of Windows 7 Service Pack 1.
Better UI, Speed, App Virtualization and Memory

Huber said he sees life getting easier for BMW employees with the redesigned user interface and improved memory management of Windows 7.

The desktop features of the new OS, such as the revamped taskbar, are not usually mentioned as enterprise benefits. However, Huber envisions improved worker productivity with features like thumbnail previews, which allows for quicker switching between applications.

Huber also expects Windows 7 will further promote efficiency via its speedier startup times and improved memory management.

"Windows 7 uses its resources well and starts the applications perceptibly fast," he says. "This will make the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 easier than it would have been with Vista."

Huber adds that BMW will be using XP Mode, a free virtualization feature for enterprises in Windows 7 that runs older XP-only applications through a Microsoft virtual machine containing a licensed copy of Windows XP SP3.

"With the help of application virtualization features like XP Mode, whatever software we have that is still not compatible with Windows 7 can be further used as we roll out the new OS. We can migrate legacy applications immediately and establish Windows 7 readiness later," he says.

Microsoft to deliver five critical Windows patches next week

2009-09-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

Microsoft today said it will deliver five security updates on Tuesday, all affecting Windows and all ranked "critical," the company's highest threat rating.

Unlike some months when Microsoft provides its usual advance notification for upcoming updates, this time there weren't any hints of what may be coming, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security.

"It's a foggy advance warning," said Storms. "I'm a little bit at a loss for words. There doesn't seem to be anything here that has been disclosed publicly."

That didn't stop Storms from speculating, though. "We could see another ATL update," he said, referring to the flaws in Active Template Library (ATL), a Microsoft code "library" that it and third-party developers use to create software.

Microsoft acknowledged the ATL vulnerabilities in July, when it issued two emergency updates to patch six bugs in its own software. Since then, it and several other vendors, including Adobe, have released additional patches for programs that inherited the ATL flaws.

"It wouldn't be surprising if Microsoft still had some ATL bugs to fix," said Storms, "although I think it's also likely that we'll see more third-party patches than ones from Microsoft."

All five of the security updates slated to ship next week are rated critical, and all five were tagged as affecting various versions of both the client and server editions of Windows. "I guess you could say that they're batting five for five on Windows," observed Storms. "It's also batting four for five for Vista and [Windows] Server 2008."

As Storms said, four of the five updates apply to Windows Vista -- all four of those are ranked critical -- while the same four will also impact Windows Server 2008, the newest production version of Microsoft's server software. Three of those Server 2008 updates were pegged critical, while the fourth was rated as "important," the next-lowest threat level.

Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will also receive updates Tuesday.

"We usually don't expect to see Microsoft's new OSes to be critical," noted Storms. "It's also unusual that they're all for Windows. So this is out of the ordinary."

Microsoft won't be patching the just-revealed vulnerability in its popular Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server, according to Storms. "We couldn't expect Microsoft to patch it that fast," he said, reading the tea leaves of the advance notification to dismiss any thought that the bug in IIS 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 will get a fix next week.

Even though Microsoft promised Tuesday that it would patch IIS at some point, other analysts had said it was very unlikely that Microsoft would have an IIS patch ready in time.

Next week's five updates follow the nine issued Aug. 11, the two emergency updates released in late July, and the six it shipped July 14, that month's regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday.

Microsoft will release the five updates at approximately 1 p.m. ET on Sept 8.

Appeals court grants Microsoft reprieve in Word case

2009-09-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

A federal appeals court late today granted Microsoft's request to suspend an injunction that would have barred the company from selling its Word software next month.

In a short order filed near the end of the day, the Court of Appeals for the Federal District approved Microsoft's earlier request for a stay of the injunction.

"Without prejudicing the ultimate determination of this case by the merits panel, the court determines based upon the motion papers submitted that Microsoft has met its burden to obtain a stay of the injunction," the court said.

The injunction would have prevented Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 in their current forms after Oct 10, and was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis on Aug. 11, after the company was found guilty in May by a Texas jury of infringing a patent held by Canadian software developer i4i. Davis also awarded i4i more than $290 million in damages and interest.

On Aug. 18, Microsoft filed a motion to stay the injunction while it took the case to appeal. In that motion, Microsoft warned of "massive disruptions" to its sales, as well as those of important OEM partners such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard, if the injunction was not put on hold.

Microsoft also said that the injunction, and the resulting need to retool Word to remove the infringing "custom" XML feature, could keep Word 2003 and Word 2007 -- and the suites that they are part of, Office 2003 and Office 2007 -- off the market for months.

Several days later, Microsoft was granted a fast-track appeals process, which requires i4i to file a response to Microsoft's appeal by next Tuesday, Sept. 8. Microsoft's rebuttal must reach the court by noon on Sept. 14.

Both Dell and HP have filed amicus curiae, or "friend of the court," briefs, arguing that Word's revision, and the resulting changes necessary on their part to re-image new PCs, would "require extensive time- and resource-consuming retesting."

Dell and HP also asked that, assuming a stay was not granted, that the injunction be postponed by 120 days.

"We are happy with the result and look forward to presenting our arguments on the main issues on September 23," said Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz in an e-mail today.

Kutz's reference was to the oral hearing before the Court of Appeals, during which both sides will present their cases. The three-judge panel will render its verdict at some point after the Sept. 23 hearing.

Representatives for i4i were not available for comment late Thursday.

Veeam Extends Its Leadership in VMware Backup Market with New Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0

2009-08-27T10:33:00.001-07:00

Veeam Software, award-winning provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced version 4.0 of Veeam Backup & Replication, the #1 backup solution for VMware environments. With version 4.0, Veeam will be the first to support new VMware vSphere 4 vStorage technology. With this new release, Veeam extends its leadership in the VMware backup market with the most innovative features and the most customer value. Backup & Replication 4.0 will be demonstrated in Veeam’s booth, #1202, at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco next week.

Only Veeam Backup & Replication offers full native support for new VMware vSphere functionality, and version 4.0 takes full advantage of the VMware vStorage API. This includes:
Support for thin-provisioned disks, which enables faster full backups and restore of virtual machines
The ability to leverage ESX4 changed block tracking for much faster incremental backups
Support for virtual applications (vApp), resulting in more flexibility when setting up backup jobs

The vStorage API is a VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) replacement that enables local area network-free backups directly from storage area network (SAN) storage, without affecting an organization’s production ESX or ESXi hosts.

“With VCB being phased out, the vStorage API is the recommended API for VMware vSphere backup,” explained Ratmir Timashev, Veeam President and CEO. “Native support for the vStorage API makes Veeam Backup & Replication the most advanced and future-proof solution available on the market, extending its technology leadership with innovative features and functionality requested by our customers.”

“Not only is Veeam Backup & Replication easy to deploy and manage, but it is also cost-effective,” commented Veeam customer Paul Redpath, Technical Director, Catalyst2 Services Ltd. “We’re getting more for our money as we grow our infrastructure because with Veeam, we’re experiencing 30 to 40 percent data compression during backups. It adds up to real storage cost savings.”

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 also includes a new Enterprise Management Server that enables enterprise customers to manage multiple installations of Veeam Backup & Replication through a single web console. This allows customers to centralize backup and decentralize restore processes according to their administrative, business, geographical, and security requirements and boundaries. Native support for this distributed architecture offers the ability to easily scale VMware backup infrastructure as the virtual environment grows, while also providing centralized management and reporting capabilities.

Additional new features in Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 include:
Near real-time replication leveraging new vSphere ESX4 functionality to provide five-minute increments to achieve better recovery point objectives (RPOs)
Hot VM copy capability to mirror production environments to test lab storage, for datacenter migrations or for ad-hoc backups
Backup storage space monitoring with alerts for advanced backup storage capacity planning
Replica seeding for the initial replication using removable storage to minimize traffic over WAN
And much more

The full list of new features is described in a three-page document “What’s New in Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0” available at www.veeam.com/go/backup40.

Pricing and Availability

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 is expected to be generally available in early October. North American pricing for the new version starts at $599 per socket, but the previous version’s price of $499 per socket will be honored on orders placed by Dec. 31, 2009. More information, including a product video, is available at www.veeam.com/go/backup40.

Sybase Works With Symantec and VMware to Strengthen Data Infrastructure for Grid and Cloud Computing Environments With Latest Release of Adaptive Serv

2009-08-27T10:32:00.002-07:00

Sybase, Inc. (NYSE:SY), an industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software, today announced the newest release of Adaptive Server® Enterprise (ASE) Cluster Edition, its enterprise data management solution that reduces the complexity of deploying a database application across a shared disk server cluster environment.

Sybase has worked with its early customers and partners to help enterprises realize the benefits of grid and virtualized deployment in its latest version of ASE Cluster Edition. By providing dynamic resource management for a virtualized database environment, ASE Cluster Edition allows enterprises to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs) of their critical databases for availability while also reducing infrastructure costs through optimal resource utilization.

“Historically, deploying clustered systems on physical hardware has been complex and costly to test, develop, deploy and manage,” said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances at VMware. “Now, with Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition running on the industry-leading VMware platform, customers have further proof that they can virtualize their mission-critical workloads, simplify their management, and achieve levels of availability and continuity not possible on physical systems.”

“Together, Symantec and Sybase are delivering a truly integrated database and storage clustering solution to joint customers,” said Josh Kahn, vice president of product management, Storage and Availability Management Group at Symantec. “The combination of Sybase’s ASE Cluster Edition database and Veritas Storage Foundation for Sybase® ASE CE empowers customers with significant improvements in performance, availability and data management.”

ASE Cluster Edition’s newest enhancements provide key enabling technologies to ease manageability and improve availability in grid and cloud computing environments. Sybase has developed the latest version of ASE Cluster Edition to include:
Expanded partner ecosystem
Integration with Veritas Storage Foundation™ and Veritas™ Cluster Server – increasing the manageability, performance and availability of shared storage environments
Participation in the VMware® vCloud initiative – providing support for cloud computing environments
Extended Availability
Disaster recovery site support – allowing cluster support at remote sites if a primary site goes down
Ease of Manageability
Local installation - each node can be installed independently, improving flexibility and increasing availability of other nodes should one go down
Foundation for rolling upgrades – enabling independent maintenance of each node

“Because of its ability to provide agile deployment of physical resources, including servers and storage, and to deploy databases in a highly virtualized way, defining virtual servers and virtual clusters within the managed set of physical resources, Sybase ASE Cluster Edition provides features that enable the kind of flexibility and scalability necessary to deploy a database in the cloud. Also, because grid computing requires great flexibility and places highly variable workload demands on databases, features such as those in Sybase ASE Cluster Edition would seem essential to deploying database applications in a grid-based fashion,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president for Information Management and Data Integration, IDC1.

“The latest release of ASE Cluster Edition incorporates the feedback we've received from our customers, who run some of the world's most critical data in areas such as financial services, telecommunications and government,” said Brian Vink, vice president Database Products at Sybase. “We continue to work closely with our customers and partners to deliver innovative database technologies like ASE Cluster Edition that offer superior availability, resource optimization and low total cost of ownership.”

Availability

Sybase ASE Cluster Edition is currently available. Please visit http://www.sybase.com/clusters for more information.

VMware Announces More Than 21,000 New Customers in the First Half of 2009 and Strong Customer Traction With VMware vSphere

2009-08-27T10:32:00.001-07:00

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, announced strong customer traction for VMware's industry-leading virtualization platform. In the first half of 2009, more than 21,000 new customers have purchased VMware solutions -- equivalent to an average of 121 new customers per day. In addition, VMware vSphere™ 4 has reached more than 350,000 downloads in the first 12 weeks of general availability -- at an average rate of 140 downloads per hour. According to a recent poll on http://www.vmware.com/, approximately 75 percent of customers that responded are upgrading or plan to upgrade to VMware vSphere™ 4 within the next six months.

VMware vSphere™ 4 delivers customers the following critical benefits: offers unmatched cost savings; delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

Unmatched Cost Savings Even Compared to So-Called "Free" Offerings
VMware vSphere™ 4 helps customers reduce capital expenses by up to 60 percent and operational expenses by an average of 33 percent. By allowing companies to make more efficient use of today's powerful servers, VMware vSphere™ 4 also enables unmatched cost savings even when compared to so-called "free" offerings.

"As a result of upgrading to VMware vSphere 4, the museum has saved $200,000 AUD on hardware procurement costs since migrating from VMware Infrastructure 3. We've also reduced our power requirements by 33 percent and have achieved a server consolidation ratio of 12:1," said Dan Collins, manager of information technology at Powerhouse Museum. "VMware vSphere 4 has also dramatically improved our infrastructure responsiveness and flexibility, and most importantly enhanced our recoverability of systems and information."

Boosted Performance and Improved Service Levels for Business Critical Applications
With VMware vSphere 4, customers are extending the benefits of virtualization to business critical applications such e-mail, database, ERP, CRM systems and others. Customers are reporting significant increases in application performance, reliability and scalability after deploying VMware vSphere™ 4.

"After seeing the benefits of virtualizing our infrastructure applications, we wanted to move our SQL database into the virtualized environment," said Roy K. Turner, server systems engineer, Frederick Memorial Hospital. "The improved performance and enhanced reliability in VMware vSphere 4 have been invaluable in exceeding our SLAs and preventing revenue loss from our mission-critical applications. VMware Fault Tolerance further improves uptime for our most critical applications by providing zero-downtime recovery from hardware failures, while VMware Data Recovery helps us easily back up and protect our critical data."

"With VMware, we've found that we can roll out new services much faster, as well as increase the reliability of existing services, while cutting the costs of doing both," said Bob Plankers, technical architect, University of Wisconsin - Madison. "With VMware vSphere 4, our infrastructure management becomes much simpler through the use of new VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Host Profiles. VMware vSphere 4 also increased the amount of I/O, memory, and CPU available, meaning we can virtualize nearly every workload we have."

Wyse Technology Improves Virtual Desktop Environments With New Flash Acceleration Technology

2009-08-27T10:31:00.002-07:00

Wyse Technology, the global leader in thin computing and client virtualization, today officially announced its new acceleration solution for Adobe Flash, as part of its incredibly popular TCX virtualization software suite. The new functionality improves the end user experience on virtual desktops by solving the Flash content quality challenge for VDI and Terminal Services environments.

"Every end user wants the performance of their thin client to be as good as or better than their PC," according to Mark Bowker, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Wyse has been steadily deploying software as part of its TCX suite toward that end and the addition of Flash acceleration capabilities will help accelerate virtual desktop adoption."

With Flash applications abundant in all industry verticals, especially financial services and education, customers are thrilled that the content acceleration challenge has been solved without compromising the end user experience.

Offered as part of the Wyse TCX virtualization software suite, the new Flash acceleration extends the capabilities of the Microsoft RDP and Citrix ICA/HDX protocols for Flash Player 9 and 10 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Compatibility with VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop connection brokers, using Windows XP Pro, Vista or Windows 7 completes the solution.

"Wyse continues to innovate and stretch the capabilities of their thin clients to provide a rich virtual desktop experience," said Sumit Dhawan, vice president, product marketing, XenDesktop product group at Citrix Systems. "Wyse technologies perfectly complement and extend Citrix HDX technologies to deliver an excellent, high-definition user experience and expand the ability of IT to offer virtual desktops to a wide variety of users."

With Flash acceleration, end users' animation, online training, YouTube, and video-rich Web sites are now seamlessly presented.

"Thin client customers using sites like CNN.com and NYSE MarkeTRAC with Flash-based tickers, are significantly improved by Wyse's new Flash content acceleration capabilities," says Param Desai, Product Manager at Wyse Technology. "Flash acceleration continues our efforts to make the thin client user experience even better than a PC."

Pricing and Availability

Flash acceleration will be commercially available in October 2009, available on Wyse's V class and R class thin clients with Windows XP Embedded, Windows Embedded Standard 2009, or Wyse ThinOS operating systems, and supported PCs. For more information on Flash acceleration and Wyse TCX, please visit http://www.wyse.com/products/software/tcx/

Leostream Releases Connection Broker 6.2

2009-08-27T10:31:00.001-07:00

update to its VDI connection broker. The company focused on adding support for Citrix in the last major update, and now, with this release, they've focused on support for Microsoft technologies.

Features of the Leostream Connection Broker 6.2 include:

Installation & Management
Easy installation as a virtual application: Connection Broker 6.2 virtual application provides native installation on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 hypervisor;
Native support for Hyper-v based virtual machines: Simplified discovery and machine power control.

End-user Experience Pack - Connection Broker provides a complete set of features to create an optimal end-user experience with Microsoft desktop virtualization software, including:
Windows 7 support: Full support for Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system;
RDP 7 support: Full support for the new remote desktop protocol (RDP) 7, with its high-performance enhancements such as bi-directional audio and rich graphics;
Multimonitor support: Leostream supports multiple monitors with RDP and a wide range of additional protocols;
USB management: USB pass-through policies allow administrators to manage classes of devices or individual devices, depending on need. USB policies can be combined with other Leostream policies, such as location-based ones, to support the exact implementation of business rules;
Location-based printing: Administrators can specify a list of network printers to connect to a particular group of clients based on their location. End-users can select local printers when connected to remote desktops;
Single Sign On for RDP: Provides seamless access to all versions of Windows virtual desktops from any client device, including Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, and RDP 7;
User profile support: Consistently offers the same desktop to the user who travels or changes physical location;
Extensive flexibility in assigning users to resources such as desktops, applications and sessions: Leostream’s powerful policy capabilities are natively available in Microsoft environments.

VMLogix Expands Support For Heterogeneous Virtualization Infrastructure in Newest Release

2009-08-27T10:29:00.000-07:00

VMLogix, Inc., a provider of virtual machine management solutions designed for software companies and IT organizations, today announced the newest version of their flagship product, VMLogix LabManager 3.8. The new release adds capabilities for network policy configurations and deployment within IP zones across multiple virtual hosts. This release also adds support for VMware vSphere 4 virtualization infrastructure and integration with VMware vCenter Server, formally VMware VirtualCenter, as well as extended support for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

"Products such as VMLogix LabManager 3.8 enable customers to leverage VMware's management console capabilities such as vMotion, which is a value add to users of vSphere and vCenter," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder and CEO of voke, inc. "As the virtualization market continues to mature and expand, an increasing number of organizations are using hybrid hypervisor environments. LabManager's ability to deploy virtual labs across multiple virtualization platforms offers choice while still ensuring centralized management functionality."

VMLogix LabManager allows development, test and support teams to build, snapshot, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand across virtualization platforms. With LabManager, customers can consolidate and automate lab IT infrastructure in order to deliver and maintain software applications more quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. Companies can dramatically reduce the manual effort, time and IT resources required to develop and maintain higher quality software applications by using comprehensive automation capabilities, advanced team management and seamless integrations with leading solutions from HP and IBM.

"VMLogix continues to develop and innovate with functionality for our virtual lab management products. We also continue to make it our priority to provide extensive support for leading virtualization platforms from VMware and Microsoft," said Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix. "Our newest release offers capabilities that make it even easier for organizations to integrate their virtual labs into their infrastructure as well as manage virtual machine instances within their deployment."

New features of VMLogix LabManager 3.8 include:
Support for VMware vCenter Server 4.0 and VMware vSphere: integrating with VMware vCenter Server 4.0, LabManager supports a lab with VMware vSphere or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 hypervisors on the virtual hosts. The support for vCenter Server in LabManager allows administrators to benefit from platform management capabilities such as vMotion, DRS, HA and resource pools.
Updated support for Microsoft Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008 R2): extending platform support functionality, taking advantage of Hyper-V R2's new shared cluster capability.
Network policies in configurations: allowing users to set custom firewall rules on the soft router in a configuration that allows virtual machines from within a LabManager configuration to connect to external IP addresses, outbound and inbound.
IP zones across multiple hosts: enabling IP-zoned LabManager configurations to be deployed across multiple virtual hosts.

Availability
VMLogix LabManager 3.8 is now generally available. For more information, visit http://www.vmlogix.com/Products/VMLogix-LabManager/.

Embotics Eases Management of Virtual Environments

2009-08-27T10:06:00.001-07:00

Embotics is rolling out Version 3.0 of its V-Commander offering for the automation and management of virtual environments, with the idea of driving down operational costs and increasing automation of the infrastructure. V-Commander also comes in three modules, enabling enterprises to pick and choose which features to buy when they need them.

Embotics is looking to reduce the operational costs associated with server virtualization in the data center.

The company Aug. 25 rolled out V-Commander 3.0, which is aimed at increasing automation and management in virtualized environments. Resource Library:

V-Commander 3.0 gives IT professionals a deep look into their environments, enabling them to get a historical look at events in their virtualized environments and offering a host of reporting capabilities. In addition, V-Commander 3.0 can establish and enforce policies, suspend virtual machines that don’t comply with policies, assign policy attributes at various levels throughout the virtual infrastructure and alert IT managers via e-mail.

The enhanced software also includes better role-based access control, support for mixed VMware environments and better compatibility with VMware’s VirtualCenter.

Embotics is offering V-Commander in three modules, enabling businesses to pick and choose what they need, giving them greater control over their virtual infrastructure deployments and an easier way to pay for them.

The modules include Federated Inventory Management, a real-time inventory and reporting system; Resource and Cost Management: Automated, which offers resource management and cost containment features, improving accountability, reducing administrative time and optimizing resource utilization; and the Operational and Risk Management module, which offers process automation and control, offering a more consistent environment and improved oversight.

How to Implement Green Data Centers with IT Virtualization

2009-08-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

The use of virtualization technology is usually the first and most important step companies can take to create energy-efficient and green data centers. Virtualization is the most promising technology to address both the issues of IT resource utilization and facilities space, power and cooling utilization. IT virtualization, along with cloud computing, is the key to energy-efficienct, flexible and green data centers. Here, Knowledge Center contributor John Lamb describes the concept of IT virtualization and indicates the significant impact that IT virtualization has on improving data center energy efficiency.

The most significant step most organizations can make in moving to green data centers is to implement virtualization for their IT data center devices. The IT devices include servers, data storage, and clients or desktops used to support the data center. There is also a virtual IT world of the future—via private cloud computing—for most of our data centers.

Although the use of cloud computing in your company's data center for mainstream computing may be off in the future, some steps towards private cloud computing for mainstream computing within your company are currently available. Server clusters are here now and are being used in many corporate data centers.

Although cost reduction usually drives the path to virtualization, often the most important reason to use virtualization is IT flexibility. The cost and energy savings due to consolidating hardware and software are very significant benefits and nicely complement the flexibility benefits. The use of virtualization technologies is usually the first and most important step we can take in creating energy efficient and green data centers.Resource Library:

Reasons for creating virtual servers

Consider this basic scenario: You're in charge of procuring additional server capacity at your company's data center. You have two identical servers, each running different Windows applications for your company. The first server—let's call it "Server A"—is lightly used, reaching a peak of only five percent of its CPU capacity and using only five percent of its internal hard disk. The second server—let's call it "Server B"—is using all of its CPU (averaging 95 percent CPU utilization) and has basically run out of hard disk capacity (that is, the hard disk is 95 percent full).

So, you have a real problem with Server B. However, if you consider Server A and Server B together, on average the combined servers are using only 50 percent of their CPU capacity and 50 percent of their hard disk capacity. If the two servers were actually virtual servers on a large physical server, the problem would be immediately solved since each server could be quickly allocated the resource each needs.

In newer virtual server technologies—for example, Unix Logical Partitions (LPARs) with micro-partitioning—each virtual server can dynamically (instantaneously) increase the number of CPUs available by utilizing the CPUs currently not in use by other virtual servers on the large physical machine. This idea is that each virtual server gets the resource required based on the virtual server’s immediate need.

Cloud computing: exciting future for IT virtualization

Cloud computing is a relatively new (circa late 2007) label for the subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to the use of shared computing resources. Cloud computing is an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users' applications. Essentially, it is an idea that the technological capabilities should "hover" over everything and be available whenever a user wants.Resource Library:

Although the early publicity on cloud computing was for public offerings over the public Internet by companies such as Amazon and Google, private cloud computing is starting to come of age. A private cloud is a smaller, cloudlike IT system within a corporate firewall that offers shared services to a closed internal network. Consumers of such a cloud would include the employees across various divisions and departments, business partners, suppliers, resellers and other organizations.

Shared services on the infrastructure side such as computing power or data storage services (or on the application side such as a single customer information application shared across the organization) are suitable candidates for such an approach. Of course, IT virtualization would be the basis of the infrastructure design for the shared services, and this will help drive energy efficiency for our green data centers of the future.

Because a private cloud is exclusive in nature and limited in access to a set of participants, it has inherent strengths with respect to security aspects and control over data. Also, the approach can provide advantages with respect to adherence to corporate and regulatory compliance guidelines. These considerations for a private cloud are very significant for most large organizations.

Cluster architecture for virtual servers

There are now many IT vendors offering virtual servers and other virtual systems. Cluster architecture for these virtual systems provides another significant step forward in data center flexibility and provides an infrastructure for very efficient private cloud computing. By completely virtualizing servers, storage and networking, an entire running virtual machine can be moved instantaneously from one server to another.

Netbooks Beat Apple Macs with Student Laptop Shopper, Survey Says

2009-08-25T07:01:00.002-07:00

More than a third of the students surveyed by Retrevo reported wanting small, lightweight notebooks this year, and more than half had a budget under $750. The result, says Retrevo, is that back-to-school shoppers are passing on Apple laptops.

Retrevo, a product search engine, says it polled more than 300 of its 4 million monthly visitors and found that the “majority of student laptop shoppers will not consider buying a Mac,” the company reported in an Aug. 18 statement.

According to Retrevo, 34 percent of students said they want laptops that are small and lightweight, while 49 percent wanted full-size PC laptops. Price was also a considerable factor.

“While Apple has done well historically in the education market, 2009 marks the dawn of the netbook,” said Retrevo CEO Vipin Jain, in a statement.

“Students told us they wanted longer battery life, smaller size and a lighter laptop. [Fifty-eight] percent of them plan on spending less than $750.00. Only 18 percent have a budget over $1,000. Netbooks are affordable; some costing only $170. In contrast, Apple laptops start at $949.” Resource Library:

Jain added: “At a time when many people are experiencing economic hardship, having a new Apple laptop isn’t a necessity.”

It’s worth noting that the students weren’t asked the types of functionalities they would need their laptops to perform. The differences between an Apple laptop and a netbook, of course, extend beyond their price points.

It’s relevant to note, too, that approximately only 7 percent of computers in the United States are Macs, according to Technology Business Research. And that’s after OS X use tripled from 25 million to 75 million users between 2007 and 2009, as Phil Schiller explained at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

With Mac users representing less than 10 percent of all computer users, and 18 percent of Retrevo’s shoppers saying they have a budget over $1,000, is it entirely accurate to say that Apple laptops are being overlooked by students this year?

“Retailers are working overtime to attract students,” said Jain in the statement. “Wal-Mart expanded its laptop selection by 40 percent and partnered with Hewlett-Packard to make a $298 Compaq Presario. Best Buy introduced the Next Class laptop line. The problem this year isn’t finding deals, it’s finding the best product for your budget.”

Apple is currently offering students a free iPod Touch with the purchase of a MacBook—a deal that ends Sept. 8.

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard Goes on Sale Aug. 28

2009-08-25T07:01:00.001-07:00

Apple’s newest big cat, Snow Leopard, is now available for pre-order in Apple’s online store and will hit shelves Aug. 28. The long feature list includes mail that loads twice as fast and built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Apple’s much anticipated Mac OS X v10.6, also known as Snow Leopard, is now available for pre-order at Apple’s online store and will go sale Friday, Aug. 28, Apple announced on Aug. 24.

Mac OS X Leopard users will be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29. In addition, anyone who purchased a new Mac between June 8 of this year and Dec. 26 can purchase a Snow Leopard upgrade package for $9.95, which includes shipping and handling.
Resource Library:

The feature list on this new beast is long, with Apple saying that its engineers have refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X. Improvements are said to include a more responsive Finder; Mail that loads messages twice as fast as Leopard Version 10.4.8; a Dock with Exposé integration; 80 percent faster initial backup to Time Machine; a redesigned QuickTime X player that enables easier viewing, recording, trimming and sharing of video; and a 64-bit, very crash-resistant version of Safari 4 that’s additionally 50 percent faster than the 32-bit version.

Like Safari, Finder, Mail, iCal and iChat are now also 64-bit, which is said to make them quicker and more secure, though still compatible with 32-bit applications.

Additionally, Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version, freeing up 7GB of space on users’ hard drives. It requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM and will run on any Mac with an Intel processor.

“Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever, and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, in a statement. “For just $29, Leopard users get a smooth upgrade to the world’s most advanced operating system and the only system with built-in Exchange support.”

The built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 should answer any remaining questions about whether Apple is interested in enterprises.

For OS X Tiger users with an Intel-based Mac, the upgrade will be available with iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 for $169, or $229 for a Family Pack.

Apple’s new Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard will also go on sale Aug. 28, for $499 with an unlimited number of client licenses.

HP Scores Air Force Contract Win

2009-08-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

The deal includes placing a wide array of HP platforms at Air Force facilities worldwide, including the HP xw4600 Workstation, which combines next-generation performance technologies into a single processor socket workstation.

HP said Aug. 24 it landed a new Air Force contract to provide new HP Workstation and desktop PCs as part of its enterprise IT purchase program. The award is part of the Air Force's DLS (desktop, laptop and servers) Quarterly Enterprise Buy (QEB).

The QEB award will include the HP xw4600 Workstation, which combines next-generation performance technologies into a single processor socket workstation. Dual PCIe X16 Gen2 graphics interfaces provide up to four times the performance of previous graphics interfaces, along with the ability to power multiple displays without compromise.

Additionally, with an 80 PLUS efficient power supply standard and Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registered configurations available, the HP xw4600 is designed to optimize energy use while maintaining high-performance power.

HP will include customized security configurations that meet Air Force specifications and tests.

The Air Force Information Technology Commodity Council, which includes top Air Force officials, evaluates vendors' submissions for the QEB and their ability to deliver quality enterprise computing in the toughest of environments.

INSIDE MOBILE: How MiFi Provides Mobile Internet Access on Multiple Devices

2009-08-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

Wi-Fi is great at home and in the office at providing mobile Internet access around the premises. However, MiFi makes a lot of sense for the traveler who needs mobile Internet access on multiple devices at the same time. Here, Knowledge Center mobile and wireless analyst J. Gerry Purdy explains what MiFi is and how it works to provide simultaneous Internet access for multiple notebook PCs or mobile devices.

There's a really cool solution to getting Internet access while traveling called MiFi (pronounced "My-Fi"). It is a small device that is basically two wireless components in one package: a wide area wireless cellular modem and a Wi-Fi access point. Verizon Wireless provided me with a MiFi unit to test a few weeks ago, and I finally had a trip scheduled in which I could try it out.

My wife and I attended my son Jason's wedding in Maine (held at the beautiful Retreat at French's Point) and stayed in the Belfast Bay Inn, a classy bed and breakfast right in the heart of Belfast, Maine. I set up our three notebook PCs: my Frost & Sullivan system, my personal system and my wife Alicia's system.Resource Library:

In order to get the MiFi working, it has to be provisioned by Verizon Wireless (so it was a valid unit on the network) and then activated (my account was established with Verizon Wireless PR). With the help of Brenda Rainey in Verizon Wireless PR, the unit got provisioned to work and then activated as a demo unit.

Normally, the MiFi unit would require a two-year commitment at $40 for 250MB or $60 per month for 5GB of use. Obviously, since we carry around three notebook PCs, we would have normally had to sign up for three wide area wireless modem accounts: one for each notebook PC or three times $40 to $60 per month (or $120 to $180 per month).

To be sure, many hotels provide Wi-Fi but in many cases they charge anywhere from $9.95 to $19.95 for 24 hours of access. Some hotels—most notably Marriott Courtyard and similar mid-tier hotels that cater to the business traveler—provide free Wi-Fi access. But most of the time (independent of whether you purchased Wi-Fi access or not) the hotel requires you to input your hotel room number and then will only allow one computer to have access to that account number at one time.

My wife Alicia and I spent our first night traveling to the wedding in the Hyatt Regency in Boston. Brenda was working to get my MiFi activated so I had to sign up for one day of Wi-Fi access through T-Mobile. The cost was $9.95 for 24 hours of access, but their system would only provide for one account access at a time.

We had to log out when done looking at e-mail and browsing on one system, log on with the other computer, and sort of continually switch access during that evening and the next morning before leaving for Maine. It was a pain to continually have to switch accounts to get Internet access for our three notebook PCs.

Brenda got my MiFi working the next day, so I set it up in the living area in the Belfast Bay Inn. In order to get it working, you have to attach the MiFi to one of your notebook PCs. The software to activate the MiFi unit self-loads. Once it's activated, you can leave it connected—in which case it operates as a "tethered" wide area wireless access modem. But to make it work as a MiFi, you unplug it from the computer and press the lighted button on the unit. At that point, the access portion of the MiFi begins to transmit its service set identifier (SSID), which I could see from each of our notebook PCs.

The notebook PC shows the Wi-Fi AP with the name "Verizon" with the modem ID and notation as "Security-Enabled" (to make sure others can't get unauthorized access and consume your allotted capacity). When you select it, Windows asks you to enter either a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key or password. After I entered the password (supplied on the back of the modem), I was able to get concurrent access for all three of our notebook PCs during the remainder of our trip.

Upon Return to Apple, Jobs Focuses on Tablet Device

2009-08-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that the return of CEO Steve Jobs, and his dedication to producing a tablet computer, is ruffling some feathers at Apple.

While reports of an impending announcement of a tabletlike device from Apple continue to consume the Internet, new information suggests since CEO Steve Jobs’ return to active duty at the company, his focus has been on the production and launch of such a device.

The Wall Street Journal quoted sources “familiar with the situation” as saying Jobs has been concentrating on a portable, touch-screen device since his return, causing a certain measure of frustration among other Apple employees.

"People have had to readjust” to Jobs’ return, an unnamed employee told the paper, although an e-mail Jobs sent to the WSJ said much of the paper’s information was incorrect, albeit without going into further detail. Jobs took a six-month medical leave of absence from the company in January of this year, approximately five years after he revealed he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Resource Library:

For months, rumors concerning the release of a tablet device from the company known for its astutely designed, if expensive, computers and consumer devices such as the popular iPhone and iPod digital music player, have piqued the interest of analysts, investors and consumers. Despite the growing popularity of smaller, less expensive netbooks, Apple COO Tim Cook and Jobs have repeatedly stated they have no interest in producing a computer in the $500 range, which is the price point where most netbook manufacturers find themselves around. The tablet device is widely considered to be Apple’s alternative answer to those devices and an attempt to change consumers’ conceptions about tablet computers, which have struggled to find an audience.

Earlier this month, Barron’s reported that an unnamed analyst got a look at the tablet the company has in the works, which features a 10-inch screen and integrated 3G, according to the financial publication. The tablet is expected to be priced between $699 and $799 and, as a media- and game-focused device, be capable of playing high-definition movies. Some pundits predict the tablet will make its debut during Apple’s press event on Sept. 9, though other analysts and research firms suggest a release date closer to January 2010.

Adding to the frenzy of the tablet rumors was a research note released earlier this month by Piper Jaffray, which said the Apple tablet PC will be cheaper than a MacBook but still more expensive than the netbooks that are currently dominating sales on the lower end of the PC market. Despite that higher price point, Piper Jaffray sees an Apple tablet PC as a challenger in the netbook market, as well as competing against mobile devices from companies such as Amazon.com.

The issue of price is still expected to play a role in the release of such a device, at least to the lucrative college student market, according to a recent survey by product review search service Retrevo. While the tablet is expected to be priced within the general netbook market, albeit the higher end, its notebooks, which start at $949, may start to see sales declines.

Retrevo said it polled more than 300 of its 4 million monthly visitors and found that the “majority of student laptop shoppers will not consider buying a Mac,” with price being a considerable factor.

Microsoft to 'ribbonize' Vista with Windows 7 look

2009-08-25T06:55:00.002-07:00

Microsoft will offer Windows 7's ribbon-style application interface to Windows Vista users in an update this October, according to the company.

As first reported by Long Zheng, the blogger who writes the popular istartedsomething.com, Microsoft will provide Vista users an optional update that installs the code necessary to display Windows 7's Ribbon framework on its predecessor.

The framework, called "Scenic Ribbon," is a derivation of the ribbon-esque "Fluent" user interface that debuted in Office 2007 two years ago. Both feature a wide ribbon-like display at the top of a window that replaces the traditional drop-down menus, small icons and toolbars that have standardized Windows applications' look-and-feel for decades. Office 2007 faced serious resistance from some users over the ribbon when it launched, although that has subsided over time.

More recently, complaints mounted over plans by OpenOffice.org to overhaul the interface of that open-source productivity suite. Some have blasted the organization for parroting Office 2007's ribbon.

"The Office ribbon sucks. Please don't copy it," wrote one user in a comment to a Sun Microsystems blog. Sun contributes engineering and developer time to OpenOffice.org.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said the ribbon interface would be used by both Microsoft and third-party developers to distinguish new applications for Windows 7 from older versions that ran, say, on Windows XP or Windows Vista.

"This is one of the things we think will differentiate apps written for Windows 7, as opposed to those for earlier versions of Windows," said Mike Nash, the head of Microsoft's Windows product management, in an interview with Computerworld last January.

That plan seems to be in tatters now. Starting in October, application developers will be assured that new software they've crafted to include the Scenic Ribbon interface will also run on Vista.

"A Windows 7 interoperability pack, known as the Windows 7 Client Platform Update, is to be released alongside Windows 7 in October of this year," said Karl Bridge, a Microsoft programming writer, in a message posted last week to a forum on the MSDN (Microsoft Developers Network) site. "This update provides down-level support for the Windows Ribbon framework and will be made available from the Microsoft Download Center and as a 'Recommended update' on Windows Update."

Bridge added that the update will support all versions of Vista, including the entry-level Home Basic and Starter, which for Vista has been sold only in a limited number of markets overseas.

Application developers who build software with Windows 7's ribbon interface will have to point users to Windows Update or Microsoft's download site to grab the Client Platform Update, or silently call Windows Update as part of setup, Bridge said.

Microsoft's most visible "ribbonized" Windows 7 applications are the revamped Paint and retooled Wordpad, the basic image editor and word processor, respectively, bundled with the OS.

Windows XP users will be out of ribbon luck, however, as the October update will not apply to the eight-year-old operating system.

Virtual desktops to the rescue

2009-08-25T06:55:00.001-07:00

Back in September 2008, while Louisville, Ky., was recovering from a wind storm that left much of the city without power, IT Director Brian Cox was dreaming not of gentle breezes but of desktop virtualization.

FAQ: Desktop virtualization

The storm left Cox, who is director of IT customer service at Norton Healthcare, scrambling to create temporary desktops for about 200 employees from an outlying billing office who had been knocked off the power grid. "You can go for a day or two without power and get caught up, but once the outage hits three or four days, if you're not getting your bills out the door, especially with time-sensitive Medicare and Medicaid, you don't get paid for services you provided," he says.

Three days into the outage, Cox began setting up workers at PCs in training rooms and other temporary spots and loading up their applications. "If we had had desktop virtualization in place for them, many could have worked from home, a different office or contingency location like a hotel and have had access to their applications right away. We would have been able to say, 'OK, log in here just like you do from the office,' and they'd have been back to work in no time."

Fortunately, the situation wasn't as dire as it could have been. Norton already had embraced a virtual desktop infrastructure for the company's five hospitals, plus a few specialized cases. One of those special instances involved moving billing types that required no "human touch" onto the virtualized infrastructure -- meaning, onto hosted desktops in the data center. "When the power went out, the billing office, the lady running those systems was able to work from home and she got 50% of the bills out the door," Cox says.

From hospital floors to satellite offices

Since the end of 2007, the IT team has deployed 950 virtual desktops, mostly in Norton's five hospitals, for physician and nurse access to a host of applications, including the main healthcare information and picture archiving systems. "We've been able to run just about every single application we've tried on the virtual desktops," Cox says.

Previously, Norton used Citrix Systems' MetaFrame client/server technology to provide access to the healthcare information system, but that had become too limiting. Users wanted to be able to tap into more than just that one application from a terminal, he says.

For the virtualized desktop infrastructure, Norton uses VMware View (formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI) running on 10 IBM 3850 M2 hosts. Norton has been sprinkling thin clients throughout the hospitals, from which physicians, nurses and other personnel can access applications once they've been authenticated via the hospital's Sentillion single sign-on system. Most clients are Wyse Technology terminals, but Norton also has repurposed some older desktops with a VMware overlay, Cox says. Windows XP is the current operating system in use.

Microsoft to raise some EU Windows 7 prices

2009-08-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp. said today that it will raise prices for non-upgrade editions of Windows 7 sold in Europe starting Sept. 1.

But because most users will upgrade copies of Windows XP or Vista -- and those upgrade prices will remain unchanged -- or buy a new PC with Windows 7 already installed, only a minority will feel the extra pinch.

Also today, Microsoft announced that it will sell its multilicense "Family Pack" Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade to users in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. for a limited time starting Oct. 22.

Windows 7's price jump is one of the side effects of Microsoft's decision last week to drop the "E" edition for European customers. In countries that use the euro, increases will range from €20 to €80; they will range between £30 and £70 in the U.K.

Three weeks ago, Microsoft ditched its plan, first announced in mid-June, to sell European customers Windows 7E, a version of the upcoming operating system that would omit Internet Explorer 8. The company instead came up with a plan to give Windows 7 users the ability to choose the Web browser they want to use. Although Microsoft has not gotten the green light from EU antitrust regulators that the so-called browser ballot screen scheme will be accepted, it was confident enough in its chances to back away from a Europe-only edition.

Windows 7E and the ballot screen are two concessions Microsoft has made this year in an attempt to prevent antitrust officials from levying fines or demanding more significant changes to the company's practice of bundling IE with Windows.

Because Windows 7E could only be offered in a so-called "full" version that required a clean install -- an in-place upgrade would have left IE on users' PCs -- Microsoft had planned to sell only those full, or non-upgrade, editions in Europe, but at the upgrade versions' prices.

That will change as of Sept. 1, Microsoft said today. "[This] means that we are now able to have an upgrade version of Windows 7 available in Europe at launch," said Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc in an entry on a company blog today. "Windows 7 retail boxes will be available in both Full and Upgrade versions via pre-orders through Microsoft online stores where available and our retail partners starting September 1 and at General Availability on October 22."

Unlike an upgrade of Windows, a "full" edition can be installed on a machine not running Microsoft's operating system.

After Sept. 1, prices for Windows 7 upgrades in the U.K. will be £79.99 for Home Premium, £189.99 for Professional and £199.99 for Ultimate. In other countries, prices will be €119.99 for Home Premium, €285 for Professional and €299 for Ultimate.

New prices for the "full" versions in the U.K. will be £149.99 (Home Premium), £219.99 (Professional) and £229.99 (Ultimate). Prices for the same editions in countries that use the euro will be €199.99 (Home Premium), €309 (Professional) and €319 (Ultimate).

Those prices take effect Sept. 1.

People who have already pre-ordered Windows 7E, and who continue to do so through Aug. 31, will receive the full versions, as originally promised, LeBlanc said.

Microsoft also added eight more countries to the list of those where it will sell a Family Pack starting Oct. 22, Windows 7's official on-sale date. The packs let buyers upgrade as many as three PCs from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium.

LeBlanc tied the availability of a Family Pack in those eight European countries to the decision to kill Windows 7E. "So what changed to make this possible? Basically, the fact that we are now able to have an upgrade version of Windows 7 available at launch," LeBlanc said.

Late last month, Microsoft announced that it would sell the Family Pack to U.S. and Canadian customers.

As has been its practice, Microsoft set the prices of the European editions of the Family Pack at amounts that are much higher than U.S. prices when currency exchange rates are taken into account.

In the U.K., the three-license pack will go for £149.99, or $246.03 at current exchange rates; that's $96.04 more than the $149.99 U.S. price tag. Customers elsewhere in Europe will pay €149.99 for Family Pack, or $214.56 at today's exchange rate, for a $64.57 premium over the U.S. price.

Like in the U.S., however, the Family Pack can dramatically drive down the price of upgrading several machines for European users. In the U.K., the pack costs £92.98, which is less than the cost of three separate Home Premium upgrade licenses, while in the rest of Europe the savings comes to €209.98.

Microsoft has said that it will start taking pre-orders for Family Pack Oct. 18. The company has declined to specify how long the limited time offer will run or, if it's pegged to unit sales, at what point Microsoft will stop selling Family Pack.

Bad Software Design Inhibits Use of Enterprise Apps

2009-08-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Wondering why your company's staffers are using only a fraction of the software features and functionality that your bounteous enterprise software offers?

Harold Hambrose can give you an answer. In fact, Hambrose, founder of Electronic Ink, a consultancy specializing in designing and developing business systems, wrote a book about what he claims is the $60 billion that U.S. businesses will waste this fiscal year on poorly designed software.

The new book, Wrench in the System (Wiley), takes a scathing look at business software development practices, especially the products of enterprise vendors. "Software manufacturers are generally confident that their products will succeed on the strength of their technology," Hambrose writes. "But products that don't appeal to their users can be self-defeating. Whenever software systems create obstacles-technical jargon, ambiguous messages, illogical sequences or visual clutter-the people who use these systems will respond in a variety of ways." That typically includes undesired behaviors that users (and CIOs and applications managers) know all too well-frustrating and inefficient workarounds, complete disregard for business process, or abandonment of the application altogether.

Hambrose went to Carnegie Mellon University for graphic design and, later, contributed to the user interface for IBM's OS/2 and the first computerized patient record for First Data, notes his bio. He founded Electronic Ink in 1990 and has since worked with British Petroleum, Comcast, McDonald's, Research in Motion, among other Fortune 500 firms on software design issues.

In his book, Hambrose offers advice and explains low-cost development changes that can make a huge difference. CIO.com Senior Editor Thomas Wailgum recently talked with Hambrose about user frustrations, why most packaged vendors apps are poorly designed, and why he wrote the book.

"I wanted to be able to give a larger audience the tools to push back on IT vendors more effectively and perhaps give some power to people in trenches to stand up and say: 'This is why this system sucks for me,'" Hambrose says. "I hope the book appeals to not only the CIOs out there, but to the doctors, nurses, stockbrokers and whoever else is wrestling with systems that have been put in their hands with the best intentions, but yet they're still wrestling with them."

CIO.com: What's the biggest pushback you hear from potential customers or software vendors?

Harold Hambrose: In the larger ERP environments, the biggest pushback you hear is: "Oh, you're a design team, and you're going to propose we customize our SAP or Oracle system." And that's just not true. What we represent is a method to configure the system-prelaunch-that improves usability and adoption.

Another pushback I hear is: "I have business analysts around the table, so don't they do what you folks do?" No. In fact, we want you to replace business analysts with designers. We know that you folks understand the business. What designers afford you to do is to model that in new ways and all those models allow you to change the way you're thinking with this tool.

Desktop multiprocessing: Not so fast

2009-08-25T06:51:00.000-07:00

Not every application can be reprogrammed for multicore architectures, and some bottlenecks will always remain. Here's why.

Until recently, you could reasonably expect this year's software to run faster on next year's machines, but that's not necessarily true going forward. For the foreseeable future, significant performance improvements are likely to be achieved only through arduous reprogramming.

Some time ago, computer vendors passed the point of diminishing returns concerning processor clock speeds, and could no longer keep hiking frequency rates. To maintain continued performance improvements, suppliers turned to installing multiple instances of the processor -- multiple cores -- on a processor chip, and as a result, multicore processors are now mainstream for desktops. But to realize any performance improvements the software has to be able to use those multiple cores.

And to do that, most software will need to be rewritten.

"We have to reinvent computing, and get away from the fundamental premises we inherited from von Neumann," says Burton Smith, technical fellow at Microsoft Corp., referring to the theories of computer science pioneer John von Neumann (1903 - 1957). "He assumed one instruction would be executed at a time, and we are no longer even maintaining the appearance of one instruction at a time."

But software cannot always keep up with the advances in hardware, says Tom Halfhill, senior analyst for the Microprocessor Report newsletter in Scottsdale, Ariz. "If you have a task that cannot be parallelized and you are currently on a plateau of performance in a single-processor environment, you will not see that task getting significantly faster in the future."
New law in town

For four decades, computer performance progress was defined by Moore's Law, which said that the number of devices that could economically be placed on a chip would double every other year. A side effect was that the smaller circuits allowed faster clock speeds, meaning software would run faster without any effort from programmers. But overheating problems on CPU chips have changed everything.

"The industry has hit the wall when it comes to increasing clock frequency and power consumption," says Halfhill. There are some chips edging above 4GHz, "but those are extreme cases," he says. The mainstream is still below 3GHz. "The main way forward is through multiple processors."

By adding more cores to the CPU, vendors offer the possibility of higher performance. But realizing higher performance through multiple cores assumes that the software knows about those cores, and will use them to run code segments in parallel.

Even when the software does that, the results are gated by Amdahl's Law. Sometimes called Amdahl's Curse, and named for computer pioneer Gene Amdahl, it lacks the upbeat outlook of Moore's Law. It says that the expected improvement from parallelization is 1 divided by the percentage of the task that cannot be parallelized plus the improved run time of the parallelized segment.

In other words, "It says that the serial portion of a computation limits the total speedup you can get through parallelization," says Russell Williams, chief architect for Photoshop at Adobe Systems in San Jose, Calif. "If 10% of a computation is serial and can't be parallelized, then even if you have an infinite number of infinitely fast processors, you could only get the computation to run 10 times faster."

New IDC Viewpoint Research "Removing Storage-Related Barriers to Server and Desktop Virtualization" - Now Available for Download at DataCore Software

2009-08-23T17:31:00.001-07:00

DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that a new IDC Viewpoint research paper titled “Removing Storage-Related Barriers to Server and Desktop Virtualization” is now available for free download.

IDC Viewpoint Report Availability

The IDC Viewpoint report “Removing storage-Related Barriers to Server and Desktop Virtualization” is available now and may be downloaded by going to: http://www.datacore.com/forms/form_request.asp?id=IDCview

The IDC Viewpoint discusses, “An alternative to costly investments in high-end storage systems. It proposes using storage virtualization software to create scalable, robust SANs using equipment already in place. This hardware-independent approach complements server and desktop virtualization without compromising availability, speed, or project schedules…Just as importantly, it can significantly lower capital and operational expenditure for physical and virtual environments alike, making such transitional initiatives viable.” *

Extending Virtualization to the SAN

“In addition to server virtualization, industry analysts are now grasping the real benefits of storage virtualization,” states George Teixeira, president and CEO, DataCore Software. “Software-based storage virtualization is important because it helps IT organizations get more out of their existing hardware investments – and it does so by enabling IT organizations to turn existing storage arrays from multiple vendors into a shared pool of disk storage. Creating virtual storage pools out of existing storage investments, which easily marry with virtual servers, represents the real value that storage virtualization software delivers.”

The research report covers the following topics:
What makes server, desktop, and storage virtualization attractive?
What are the Challenges to Implementing Virtualization?
Extending Virtualization to the SAN
Key Considerations When Choosing a Storage Virtualization Software Solution

Key IDC recommendations included in the report:
Choose storage virtualization software that is not tied to any one hardware vendor so that you will have the most latitude when selecting future devices.
Ensure that the storage virtualization software you pick for virtual systems also addresses your physical servers and competing server virtualization platforms. Otherwise, you may end up fragmenting the IT environment that you are eager to consolidate.

Adds Teixeira, “It is nice to see that after all the rush to embrace server virtualization there is now an increasing interest in storage virtualization. Most storage hardware vendors require customers to buy new storage arrays that support storage virtualization. But in these difficult economic times, it's hard to make an argument for capital expenditures that are so dear.”

* Source: “Removing Storage-Related Barriers to Server and Desktop Virtualization,” an IDC Viewpoint research document published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service. Author: Carla Arend, European Storage Software and Services, IDC EMEA. Publication date: July 2009.

Free 30-day trial – Try DataCore Today!

For a free 30-day test drive, please visit: http://www.datacore.com/trialsoftware.

GlassHouse Technologies and Splunk Outline Steps to Secure Virtual Environments

2009-08-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

GlassHouse Technologies, the leading independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm, today announced the availability of a whitepaper that provides insight on securing virtual environments. Co-authored by Splunk, the foremost IT Search company, the paper entitled “Does Virtualization Change Your Approach to Enterprise Security?” focuses on how enterprises can mitigate security risks in their virtual settings in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Consultants from GlassHouse Technologies and representatives from Splunk will also be available to discuss these findings and other emerging virtualization trends at the VMworld conference on August 31 – September 3.

While organizations have rushed to implement virtualization and achieve the promised benefits, many have overlooked the proper strategy necessary to secure this environment. To help enterprises combat the growing concerns over virtual security, this research focuses on best practices that should be implemented to ensure virtual components are meeting all organization security protocols without hindering the performance of the infrastructure.

Specifically, the whitepaper explores the following components:
Aligning security strategy with business risk tolerance
Securing virtual machines, including like physical machines
Security monitoring of virtual environments including administrative virtualization management interface, and access to the virtual machine files

These specific strategies will be discussed in greater detail by Splunk and GlassHouse consultants at VMworld. This year’s conference will bring together attendees from across the globe to discuss trends and challenges in the virtualization space. Make sure to look for the GlassHouse “Conversation Cloud” at the show to hear more about virtual security as well the consultants views on emerging cloud trends in storage, security and data center management. GlassHouse will also host an event at the show bringing together customers, partners and industry experts to continue VMworld discussions.

VMware vSphere Training Video Now Available from TrainSignal

2009-08-23T17:27:00.002-07:00

Great news! For those of you looking at, moving to or already running VMware's latest virtualization platform, vSphere 4.0, TrainSignal has announced the launch of its latest virtualization training video, VMware vSphere Training.

Like other virtualization training series from TrainSignal, this one was created and presented by David Davis. This particular video contains 17 hours of video training that includes multiple formats like AVI, WMV, iPod/iPhone, and MP3 - so, a format that should please most everyone. The video starts from the planning and implementation of vSphere 4 and moves all the way into advanced features like Fault Tolerance (FT), Data Recovery, and vDS.

I've been at this virtualization game now for more than 10 years. And I must say, there are so few people in this industry that can create and pull off these types of training videos as well as David Davis and TrainSignal. These TrainSignal videos are put together extremely well - top notch in my mind. And David Davis has a unique way of explaining his topics in a single video series that reaches across a wide audience: beginners, novice and advanced users alike. No matter what path you find yourself on in your virtualization journey, I believe there is something for everyone in these videos. And I highly recommend them to everyone.

You can find out more information and purchase the new TrainSignal VMware vSphere Training video now.

TrainSignal will also be at VMworld this year.

Verizon Business Helps Customers Unlock the Power of Virtualization

2009-08-23T17:27:00.001-07:00

With virtualization in high demand by enterprises looking to boost efficiency and flexibility while controlling costs, Verizon Business is offering a series of tips for effectively planning and organizing the often-complex of task of implementing virtualization technology.

Virtualization uses technology to remove the physical barriers associated with servers and applications, enabling the consolidation or replacement of servers, storage, network and other physical devices. As a result, companies can better use computing capacity and drive more value from IT resources as well as consolidate data centers and lower energy consumption.

According to analysts at IDC, virtualization is one of the most sought-after IT technologies today, with services aimed at delivering virtualization projected to grow to nearly $16 billion by 2013, up from $8.7 billion in 2008.

Zeus Highlights Results of VMware vSphere 4 Test

2009-08-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Zeus Technology, the only software-based application traffic management company, today announced the results of a performance test on VMware vSphere™ 4.

Compared to the performance of Zeus Traffic Manager software running directly on standard hardware, the Zeus Virtual Appliance offered outstanding results. The Zeus software on VMware vSphere™ 4 out-performed the native hardware by 15 - 20% in some tests, while achieving at least 85% - 90% in every test case.

The tests considered network-limited activities (requests-per-second, bandwidth and caching performance) and CPU-limited activities (Secure Socket Layer performance). Compared to VMware ESX 3.5, VMware vSphere™ 4 was on average 25% faster in all network tests.

David Day, CTO, Zeus Technology, comments: “We have recently undertaken some rigorous testing on VMware vSphere™ 4 and have achieved outstanding results. These tests demonstrate the Zeus Virtual Appliance software on VMware vSphere™ 4, can deliver a much higher performance than is required by the vast majority of websites, even during peak periods. The analysis provides further evidence that using Zeus in a Virtualized environment to handle load-balancing and application traffic management is achievable without the need to compromise on performance.”

“VMware provides the ideal infrastructure for customers to efficiently run their business-critical applications and for technology partners like Zeus, to deploy complementary solutions for application traffic management in the form of virtual appliances,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. “This new benchmark from Zeus further validates that applications can run with superior performance in VMware Virtualized environments.”

The performance figures were obtained using Zeus software running on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server equipped with an Intel(R) Quad-core Xeon(r) E5450 processor.

For further information and to view the performance figures the Zeus Virtual Appliance software gained on VMware vSphere™ 4

New Distributed Desktop Virtualization to Transform Enterprise Desktop Management

2009-08-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

Wanova, Inc. today announced Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV) - an entirely new architecture that transforms how companies manage, support and protect desktops and laptops, particularly remote and mobile endpoints. The Wanova DDV solution centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience. In related news, the company has emerged from stealth mode and announced $13 million in A-round funding.

“Despite its promises, adoption of desktop virtualization has been limited, largely due to the constraints of today’s point solutions. The problem can’t be solved solely by targeting the client, the server or even the WAN,” said Issy Ben-Shaul, CTO, Wanova. “Our virtualization architecture offers a new approach that integrates all three components – IT managers get powerful centralized management and control, the network is utilized efficiently, and remote workers get the performance they expect."

Because of this unique architecture, Wanova has demonstrated the ability to significantly reduce IT costs and improve support service level agreements. In one field test, Wanova was able to re-image an entire desktop over the WAN in just seven minutes, and conduct a complete PC restore over the WAN with the end-user up and running in 10 minutes. Typical IT support processes might take hours or even days to diagnose and repair the same computer.

"We’ve been seeing a gradual shift towards worker mobility evidenced by the notebook sales beginning to surpass those of desktop PCs. At the same time that workers are becoming increasingly mobile and distributed, IT is being tasked with reducing costs and increasing control and compliance. Wanova’s new architecture is a holistic solution that addresses these challenges and can generate serious attention in distributed enterprises,” said Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC.

How Wanova's Distributed Desktop Virtualization Works
Wanova’s Distributed Desktop Virtualization provides a Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD) in the data center. At the endpoint, Wanova’s DeskCache™ client executes a complete, local desktop instance, while Distributed Desktop Optimization (DDO) enables real-time, bi-directional transfers between the CVD and the DeskCache. Wanova also provides single image management, including mass provisioning and continuous enforcement of the base image on all computers, while enabling persistent personalization including user-installed applications.

Execution of desktop workloads is performed directly on the desktop or the laptop using the local DeskCache, resulting in a superior end-user experience with native performance and full support for offline use. Additionally, Wanova does not require a client hypervisor, so IT benefits from a complete solution that does not add additional management complexity.

Wanova’s DDV architecture is unique in that it combines advanced network optimization, desktop streaming over the WAN and image layering technologies to provide an extremely fast and optimal transport of desktop workloads. It is the first desktop virtualization approach that effectively bridges the gap between centralized management and distributed execution. Technical details can be found at www.wanova.com/pages/wanova-products.html.

Wanova’s solution is currently in field testing with early customers. Wanova will also be introduced in the New Innovators Pavilion at the VMworld 2009 Conference, August 31-Sepetmber 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The SCO Group Releases Virtualized Version of Popular OpenServer 5.0.7 UNIX Operating System

2009-08-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

The SCO Group, Inc., a leading provider of UNIX software technology and mobility solutions, today announced that it has released OpenServer 5.0.7V, a virtualized version of its popular UNIX operating system that is optimized for the VMware environment. OpenServer 5.0.7V gives customers a familiar environment while increasing the power and efficiency of a virtualized infrastructure. With OpenServer's renowned stability and reliability, now available in a virtualized environment, customers can avoid costly migration and retooling costs in order to take advantage of newer hardware and applications.

"With OpenServer 507V, SCO is protecting our customer's investment in their OpenServer applications by extending their life cycle without the need to migrate," said Jeff Hunsaker, president and chief operating officer, SCO Operations. "This provides a superior Total Cost of Ownership to an OpenServer 5 application while at the same time taking advantage of the significant performance gains with new modern hardware. We expect, in the near future, to release virtualized versions for OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.4 as well."

OpenServer 5.0.7V is released as a Virtual Appliance image that can be easily imported onto VMware ESX 3.5, VMware ESXi 3.5 and VMware Workstation 6.5.2 for Windows((R)) platforms. Importation of the Virtual Appliance usually takes between 10 and 60 minutes to complete, depending on configuration, and configuration of the imported Virtual Appliance takes a further 5-10 minutes. Once installed, the system behaves just like a natively-installed OpenServer 5.0.7 system with all of the latest maintenance installed. For convenience, many of the VMware tools have also been included to improve integration between SCO OpenServer 5.0.7V and the host VMware system.

"Using SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 as a base, SCO Engineering has built an optimized Virtual Appliance for VMware," said Andy Nagle, senior director of development, The SCO Group. "This Virtual Appliance uses a subset of existing and updated device drivers that provides optimal performance in a virtual environment."

For more information about OpenServer 5.0.7V, please visit:http://sco.com/products/unix/virtualization/

AFORE Unveils Long Distance Virtualization

2009-08-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

AFORE Solutions, Inc., today unveiled the first purpose built networking solution for extending virtualization between geographically distributed data centers. Built upon the ASE3300 platform, the Company's new Virtual Fiber and Virtual Wire capabilities enable the migration of Virtual Machines and storage across IP and Ethernet wide area networks. This technology allows enterprises and cloud computing/disaster recovery service providers to establish extended virtual data centers, creating new levels of availability and paving the way for advanced hosting and managed service offerings.

"Enterprises struggle with the high cost and limited availability of dark fiber, yet increasingly need to interconnect data centers within the enterprise or between their data centers and cloud service providers," states Jonathan Reeves, AFORE's Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. "Our Virtual Fiber and Virtual Wire technology provides a significant advancement for enterprises and cloud computing operators alike enabling data centers to be extended across great distances and bandwidth to be re-allocated on demand to meet changing application requirements."

Ensuring seamless Virtual Machine (VM) migration over a wide area network creates specific challenges. VM migration events require significant bandwidth and resources, with low latency and secure Layer 2 connectivity between hosts. Previous solutions limited wide area connectivity to dark fiber, which may be costly and impractical for a wide range of applications and business models. AFORE's Virtual Fiber technology enables lossless and secure communications over IP and Metro Ethernet wide area networks, while Virtual Wire provides transparent Layer 2 connectivity with end-to-end flow control and dynamic packet re-sizing to adapt data center packet sizes to wide area packet network capabilities as required by FC, FCoE or Jumbo frame based applications. The solution also provides time of day re-allocation of bandwidth, enabling connectivity between sites to be increased or decreased as required.

AFORE will be demonstrating long distance virtualization at VMWorld, booth 1438J, August 31 - September 3, 2009, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Virtual Fiber and Virtual Wire technology are immediately available with AFORE's ASE3300 service delivery platform.

Rackspace Private Cloud Leverages VMware For Enterprise Computing Offering

2009-08-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Rackspace Hosting, has announced its new Private Cloud offering, which allows customers to run the centrally managed VMware virtualisation platform on private dedicated hardware environments.

Rackspace recognises the demand from enterprises for a more flexible and scalable hosting solution. Although multi-tenant cloud solutions are very flexible and cost-effective, they are not always right for every segment. The Rackspace Private Cloud’s single-tenant architecture offers increased control and security, while still maintaining the scalability, flexibility and resource optimisation that make shared cloud offerings so compelling.

Rackspace Private Cloud is an evolution of its popular dedicated virtual server (DVS) offering within the managed hosting business unit. In the last year, revenue from virtualisation solutions has grown substantially, driven mainly by the increased flexibility, improved asset utilisation and lower capital and operating costs that VMware’s virtualisation provides

NetEx Takes HyperIP Virtual with Broad Application Support for WAN Optimization on VMware Infrastructures

2009-08-23T17:13:00.000-07:00

NetEx today announced that its HyperIP for VMware offers the broadest range of third-party support for applications. These include all of the leading providers of disaster recovery, data migration and replication software, such as Data Domain, Dell/EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor, Hewlett-Packard/LeftHand, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Network Appliance and many others.

The move by NetEx to virtualize the HyperIP WAN optimization software is part of an industry trend with more companies opting to deploy applications as software-only implementations to take advantage of the cost, scalability and flexibility of the VMware infrastructure. Virtualizing applications for VMware eliminates the need for specialized appliances while allowing IT organizations to quickly re-allocate computing and storage resources as needed to accommodate business priorities.

HyperIP for VMware is the industry’s only software-based WAN optimizer that operates on a VMware ESX server to boost the performance of third-party storage replication applications. Virtual HyperIP mitigates TCP performance issues that are common when moving stored data over wide area network connections because of bandwidth restrictions, latency due to distance and/or router hop counts, packet loss and network errors. HyperIP increases end-to-end performance of replication applications by 3 to 10 times, reducing VMotion and Storage VMotion transfer windows with enhanced efficiency by utilizing 80 to 90 percent of available bandwidth between data centers or branch offices up to OC12 rates.

NetEx was one of the early adopters in recognizing the impact of the virtual infrastructure, how it could benefit IT operations, and speed up data migration and replication operations when combining HyperIP for VMware with data movement applications from top tier IT storage vendors. VMware has enhanced the ESX infrastructure by redesigning the Hypervisor to support multiple cores, opening the way for all applications to be offered as virtualized pure software plays and eliminating the need for expensive appliances and expensive IP network upgrades.

The applications supported by HyperIP for VMware include: DataCore AIM, Data Domain Replicator Software; Avamar, SRDF Adaptive Copy, SRDF/DM, SRDF/A (DMX), Centera Replicator, and Celerra Replicator, RecoverPoint CRR and DL3D from EMC; Dell/EqualLogic PS Series Replication; FalconStor Software’s IPStor, Disksafe and FileSafe; HP/Lefthand Networks SANiQ; TrueCopy for iFCP from HDS; IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Global Mirror (FCIP), Microsoft NetBios and Data Protection Manager; SnapMirror and SnapVault from NetApp; NSI DoubleTake; DataGuard, DB Rsync and Streams from Oracle; SANRAD Global Data Replication; Softek Replicator; NetBackup, ReplicationExec and Volume Replicator by Symantec; Veeam Replication; and VMware VMotion. In addition, HyperIP fully supports WAN optimization for the industry standard FTP and iSCSI protocols.

How to Maximize Performance and Utilization of Your Virtual Infrastructure

2009-08-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

Most Fortune 1000 companies are currently between 15 to 30 percent virtualized. There are still a lot of obstacles to overcome to move more virtualization projects forward. The biggest virtualization challenge facing organizations is how to manage the virtual infrastructure. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Alex Bakman explains how IT staffs can dramatically improve performance and utilization efficiencies in their virtualization projects.

Organizations today are rapidly virtualizing their infrastructures. In doing so, they are experiencing a whole new set of systems management challenges. These challenges cannot be solved with traditional toolsets in an acceptable timeframe to match the velocity at which organizations are virtualizing. In a virtual server infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with proactive capacity management and proper allocation of shared resources.

The biggest challenge is finding the vast amount of time or automated technology to do this. Not allocating enough resources can cause bottlenecks in CPU, memory, storage and disk I/O, which can lead to performance problems and costly downtime events. However, over-allocating resources can drive up your cost per virtual machine, making a ROI harder to achieve and halting future projects.

To address this, organizations should consider a life cycle approach to performance assurance in order to proactively prevent performance issues—starting in preproduction and continually monitoring the production environments. By modeling, validating, monitoring, analyzing and charging, the Performance Assurance Lifecycle (PAL) addresses resource allocation and management. It significantly reduces performance problems, ensures optimal performance of the virtual infrastructure and helps organizations to continually meet service-level agreements (SLAs).Resource Library:

The following are the five components of the PAL. These components allow organizations to maximize the performance and utilization of their virtual infrastructures, while streamlining costs and delivering a faster ROI.

Component No. 1: Modeling

Modeling addresses preproduction planning to post-production additions, as well as changes to the virtual infrastructure. With capabilities to quickly model thousands of "what if" scenarios—from adding more virtual machines to changing configuration settings—IT staff can immediately see whether or not resource constraints will be exceeded and if performance issues will occur. In this way, modeling provides proactive prevention.

Four common modeling scenarios are:

1. See the effect on resource capacity and utilization of adding a new host/virtual machine or removing existing ones.

2. What will happen when a host is suspended for maintenance or a virtual machine is powered down?

3. Pre-testing VMotion scenarios to make sure sufficient resources exist.

4. How will performance be affected if resource changes are made to hosts, clusters and/or resource pools?

Component No. 2: Validating

While modeling "what if" scenarios is an important first step to continually ensuring optimal performance, it is equally important to validate that changes will not have a negative impact on infrastructure performance. Resource Library:

Validation spans between the modeling stage and the monitoring stage of the PAL, because it is equally critical to initially validate performance-impacting changes in preproduction, as well as to continually monitor and validate performance over time. If you cannot validate that a certain change will impact infrastructure performance in either a negative or positive way, there is significant risk to making that change.

Component No. 3: Monitoring

The ongoing monitoring of shared resource utilization and capacity is absolutely essential to knowing how the virtual environment will perform. When monitoring resource utilization, IT staff will know whether resources are being over or underutilized. Not allocating enough resources (based on usage patterns and trends derived from 24/7 monitoring) will cause performance bottlenecks, leading to costly downtime and SLA violations. Over-allocating resources can drive up the cost per virtual machine, making a ROI much harder to achieve.

By continually monitoring shared resource utilization and capacity in virtual server environments, IT can significantly reduce the time and cost of identifying current capacity bottlenecks that are causing performance problems, tracking the top resource consumers in your environment, alerting you when capacity utilization trends exceed thresholds, and optimizing performance to meet established SLAs.

Hyper9 VOS Helps Battle Virtual Machine Sprawl

2009-08-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hyper9 is rolling out the second version of its flagship Virtualization Optimization Suite, which is designed to give businesses improved insight into their virtualized environments and better ways to manage their VMs. While many businesses have embraced virtualization to save money in such areas as hardware, space and power, the result has been a virtualization environment that is not always easy to manage. Hyper9 VOS offers a host of new features tied together by an intuitive user interface.

Hyper9 officials want to give businesses better insight into their virtual environments.

The company July 29 rolled out the second generation of its flagship Virtualization Optimization Suite—or VOS—which is designed to help businesses create virtual environments that are suitable to their business needs, according to Bill Kennedy, executive vice president of research and development for Hyper9.

Enterprises over the past few years have embraced virtualization with the hope of reducing hardware, space and power costs by moving workloads onto virtual machines, Kennedy said in an interview. However, those same businesses are now finding that costs generated by the “VM sprawl” are going up, causing what Kennedy calls “ROI erosion.”

“It’s become harder to manage [these virtual environments],” he said.Resource Library:

Hyper9’s VOS is designed to give businesses greater insight into those environments, enabling them to not only see what VMs are running what workloads, but also giving them the ability to more easily search, organize and analyze data from the virtual environments. That data is displayed through an intuitive user interface, Kennedy said.

A recent survey of customers by the vendor found that at least 20 percent of existing VMs are superfluous to a company’s operations, which is resulting in businesses spending more money than needed on their virtual environments. Through VOS, businesses can more easily find those underutilized or unneeded VMs.

Hyper9 earlier this year rolled out the first version of its VOS offering, which was primarily aimed at virtualization administrators and offered some data collection capabilities, Kennedy said.

The latest version offers greater business insights and analytics, and is aimed at a wider array of people, including data center administrators as well as virtualization administrators.

A key new feature is Hyper9’s Workspaces, which lets users organize and share content, as well as gain better insight into the virtual machines and how they’re being used, Kennedy said.

Hyper9 also put in a feature called Active Links, which gives users one-click access to everything from data to reports to common tasks.

“You can find rogue VMs [that are not being used or are underutilized] through one click,” he said.

There also is automated monitoring and alerting, which gives users a heads up on such issues as change tracking, rogue VMs and VM sprawl.

Hyper9’s VDMA feature analyzes historical performance and configuration data.

VM6 Software Releases Virtual Machine ex Server 2.0

2009-08-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

A virtualization solution from VM6 Software comes with features like rebuild functionality and improvements in the network components layer.

Virtualization company VM6 Software announced the release of Virtual Machine ex (VM6 VMex) Version 2.0 for remote office and branch locations. VMex leverages Microsoft Hyper-V to create an internal cloud to provision, consolidate, manage and protect all of the ROBO workloads. The company said the solution does not require any specialized skill sets other than Microsoft Certified System Engineers.

New features in Virtual Machine ex 2.0 include monitoring and alert capabilities that are fully integrated into the management console, so administrators can use the predefined templates or build their own to capture errors and write in log files, send e-mails or run a script; advanced security settings systems for administrators to assign delegation to allow users to have read, write or limited access to the various objects in the VMex cloud; and improved performance for virtual shared storage rebuild.

"Enterprise organizations that have realized the benefits of virtualization in the data center are struggling with ways to extend those same benefits to remote locations and branch offices as the costs are too high and the specialized skill sets required are unavailable or cost-prohibitive." said VM6 founder and CEO Claude Goudreault. "Enterprise leaders now seek solutions that make it easier to manage, provision, consolidate and protect the workloads across all of their locations. VM6 VMex addresses the challenges of virtualization adoption in remote office locations, providing an affordable and easy way to create a competitive advantage." Resource Library:

The VMex virtual SAN rebuild function automatically rebuilds a virtual SAN in less than 5 minutes without impacting the performance, the company said, even if the RAID was unavailable or down for up to a week. The solution also boasts reduced setup time with an improved install wizard accelerating the installation of VMex on a two-node cluster, now taking less than 15 minutes.

VM6 has also improved the network components layer. Removal of the dependency to PGM and the addition of VMex proprietary network drivers eliminated the stress on the Windows kernel, adding to performance and stability, the company claims. Rounding out the features is integrated quota management and thin provisioning, where VMex administrators can provision more storage than is physically available and set proper quota alerts to prevent over allocation of physical resources.

Christian Boivin, R D director at JLR Real Estate Data Builders, said the company has been using VM6 VMex 1.0 since it became available and is pleased to see this latest version, specifically for its integrated monitoring and alerting.

"As a search engine for real estate and property information, it's critical that our IT infrastructure be robust and available at all times, while being flexible as we're essentially transforming the mission of our servers between day and night," he said. "When we looked at available solutions in the market, they were all at least five times more expensive and required a lot of independently developed solutions to work together, which further added to the complexity.”

Do Hyper-V's Improvements Make It a Stronger VMware Rival?

2009-08-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hyper-V, part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 platform, provides some improvements that were absolutely necessary for Microsoft to even think of competing with VMware's latest offerings. Are they enough? eWEEK Labs' early look at the new Hyper-V shows that Microsoft still has a lot of ground to cover.

Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 with a newly improved version of Hyper-V. Even so, VMware is still miles ahead in terms of the features and innovation that lay the foundation for sustainable virtualization for midsize and large enterprises.

In fact, I think VMware—with its just-released vSphere 4—has raised the bar so high that Microsoft's best hope is to be the low-cost leader. But while cheap, "You get what you pay for" products might work in a consumer category, they won't play too well in IT shops that depend on high-performance data operations to stay in business.

That said, here's what's new and compelling in Hyper-V.

The previous version of Hyper-V had Quick Migration to move virtual machines from one physical host to another. Now, Quick Migration is gone and Live Migration is here.Resource Library:

Click here for a look at improvements in the Hyper-V implementation.

In the weeks ahead, I'll be conducting extensive Live Migration tests on the Labs' Hewlett-Packard and Sun Xeon 5500 ("Nehalem")-based systems. But, for now, let's just say that Quick Migration was so inferior to VMware's VMotion that Microsoft had to shore up this function in Hyper-V.

I suspect that Live Migration has some catching up to do with similar VMware features that have been in field use for several years. When it comes to failover, high availability and load balancing, there is no substitute for production experience. This is one area in which cheap and OK is trumped by market-priced and reliable.

Cluster Shared Volumes are also improved in this version of Hyper-V and play an important role in making VMs highly available. The fact that these clustering enhancements support Live Migration makes them important, but they are no means innovative.

Included among the improvements is a best-practices tool to help ensure proper system configuration. I'm anxious to get started putting a clustered Hyper-V environment together here in the lab. I'll be making extensive use of this tool to see how helpful it is in putting my storage and computing resources into correct alignment.

Microsoft does have a leg up on VMware in at least one area.

Sometime in the next couple of months, Microsoft will release the next version of its System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Microsoft has years of experience in managing large numbers of Windows systems, as well as an almost equal number of years in working with third-party tool makers. Even though most of Microsoft's management experience is with Microsoft-only tools, this could be the edge it needs to win over the virtualization hearts and minds of IT managers, who will soon be measured on how well they manage their virtualized data centers (if they aren't already).

Look for my review of Hyper-V as part of eWEEK Labs' extensive coverage of the Windows Server 2008 R2 platform and Windows 7.

Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be reached at csturdevant@eweek.com.

Microsoft Azure Pulling Out of Northwest Due to Taxes

2009-08-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Azure, its public cloud-based developer platform, will no longer distribute applications to developers from its northwestern hub, as a "change in local tax laws" compels Microsoft to migrate those applications to other geographies prior to the service’s commercial launch in November. Microsoft hopes that it can seize market-share in the cloud-based services space by persuading developers to adopt the platform quickly.

Microsoft's Azure, its public cloud-based developer platform, will soon offer developers one less geographical region from which to run their applications. Azure relies on a worldwide network of distributed data centers to deliver SAAS (software as a service) to users.

"Due to a change in local tax laws, we’ve decided to migrate Windows Azure applications out of our northwest data center prior to our commercial launch this November," announced an Aug. 4 posting on the official Windows Azure blog. "This means that all applications and storage accounts in the 'USA – Northwest' region will need to move to another region in the next few months, or they will be deleted."

The posting added: "Around the time that the 'USA – Northwest' option is removed, we will also provide an automated tool available on the Windows Azure portal to migrate projects." An e-mail will be sent to CTP participants when the tool becomes available on that as-yet-unannounced date.

In addition to "USA – Northwest," Azure offers "USA – Southwest" and "USA – Anywhere" as geographies from which users can run Azure applications. Microsoft plans on adding further geographies at an undetermined time in the future. Resource Library:

Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in July that Azure would be available for free until this year’s Professional Developers Conference in November. After that point, customers will have three different options for paying for the service: a pay-as-you-go model, a subscription format or via volume licensing.

For all three types of service, users will pay 10 cents per gigabyte for incoming data, and 15 cents for outgoing data. The "consumption" model will cost 12 cents per hour for infrastructure usage, and another 15 cents per gigabyte for storage. The business edition of the SQL Azure database will cost $99.99.

Microsoft’s initial price cuts are designed to build market momentum for the platform, which will face competition from similar cloud-based offerings by Amazon.com and Google. Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft Azure, told an audience at the Worldwide Partner Conference that Microsoft would offer discounts for partners, as well as allow partners to charge customers for applications and services built using the platform.

Azure will allow developers to "deliver solutions very, very quickly," Hauger added at the time.

Azure and other cloud-based services still face structural issues, such as unexpected downtime, but analysts also feel that their presence could ease many IT professionals’ reservations about running parts of their operations in a public cloud.

Microsoft has no plans to make Azure available to run in an enterprise’s private cloud. Even so, some of Azure’s functionality, including the ability to boot from a VHD (virtual hard disk) has been integrated into Windows Server 2008.

DataCore, Citrix Combine to Distribute Free VSAN Appliance

2009-08-12T09:38:00.002-07:00

The Virtual SAN Appliance will enable IT shops that use Citrix Systems virtual server tools to test out DataCore Software's storage software at no cost. The Virtual SAN Appliance evaluation software connects Citrix Essentials with a StorageLink-certified, iSCSI shared-storage SAN that can pool up to 1TB of disk space.

Storage virtualization and disaster recovery provider DataCore Software said Aug. 6 that it has joined with Citrix Systems to distribute a free virtual storage area network appliance for IT managers to test out.

The Virtual SAN Appliance software will enable IT shops that use Citrix's virtual server tools to test out DataCore's storage software at no cost. Resource Library:

Click here to read about DataCore's SAN starter packages.

DataCore said Citrix has "released a Citrix StorageLink adapter to integrate its storage virtualization solutions with Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The Virtual SAN Appliance evaluation software ... [connects] Citrix Essentials with a StorageLink-certified, iSCSI shared-storage SAN that can pool up to 1TB of disk space."

It should be no surprise that none of this will work with VMware's ESX hypervisor, since Citrix is a dyed-in-the-wool competitor of VMware, the world's largest virtualization software company.

The virtual appliance also features thin-provisioning storage for virtual machines, speeds up application performance and creates snapshots for "Instant Volume Cloning and Fast Disk-to-Disk Backups," DataCore said.

Thin provisioning is a method of storage resource management and virtualization that lets IT administrators limit the allocation of physical storage to what applications immediately need.

Thin provisioning also enables the automatic addition of capacity on demand up to preset limits so that IT departments can avoid buying and managing excessive amounts of disk storage.

The DataCore Virtual SAN Appliance and StorageLink Adapter can be downloaded

Riverbed Offers Virtualized WAN Optimization Management

2009-08-12T09:38:00.001-07:00

Riverbed, which has already virtualized its Steelhead Mobile Controller appliance, is now offering a virtualized version of its Central Management Console, enabling MSPs to centrally manage multiple Steelhead appliances from a single physical server. The CMC-VE will let MSPs save on both capital and operational expenses, with further savings offered through flexible licensing.

Weeks after rolling out a virtualized version of its Steelhead Mobile Controller appliance, Riverbed Technology is offering managed service providers an easier way to manage multiple sets of Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimization appliances.

Riverbed Aug. 10 unveiled its Central Management Console-Virtualized Edition—or CMC-VE—enabling MSPs to centrally manage and scale multiple Steelhead appliances for their customers from a single physical machine, eliminating the need for additional hardware.

“They can support multiple deployments of Steelheads from a single console,” Karin Gerster, director of product management for verticals for Riverbed, said in an interview.Resource Library:

With IT budgets continuing to tighten, MSPs are looking for ways to control costs and spend more wisely, Gerster said. The CMC-VE will enable MSPs to do just that, she said.

While the number of Steelhead appliances that can be managed from a single physical server varies depending on the MSPs’ environments, one internal test showed that one server was able to run 50 CMC-VE instances, with each instance managing 50 Steelhead appliances. Another internal test had the same server hosting six CMC-VE instances, with each instance managing 500 appliances.

Using the CMC-VE, MSPs are able to save their clients both extra capital and operational expenses, Gerster said. Until now, the capabilities in the CMC were offered only through hardware appliances.

CMC-VE runs on VMware’s ESX virtualization platform, and can run on any server running that software.

In addition, Riverbed is offering flexible licensing, enabling MSPs to buy additional management licenses for Steelhead appliances as they’re needed. In addition, they can essentially create a pool of licenses for Steelhead appliances, and can move existing licenses from customer to customer as needed.

VMware and SpringSource: It`s All About the Cloud, Baby

2009-08-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Though Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed seemed to garner most of the headlines on Aug. 10, the bigger story for the enterprise was easily VMware's announcement of its intent to acquire SpringSource for $362 million to bolster its cloud strategy against Microsoft and others.

Though Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed seemed to garner most of the headlines on Aug. 10, the bigger story for the enterprise was easily VMware's announcement of its intent to acquire SpringSource for $362 million to bolster its cloud strategy against Microsoft and others.

Make no mistake, that is what's at the core of VMware's move here. With SpringSource under its wing, VMware can become the Java-based equivalent to what is expected to be Microsoft's Azure private cloud play -- which has .NET as its development platform. But rather than .NET, VMware will have the Java-based Spring Framework and its surrounding set of Eclipse-based tools as the development environment for the emerging VMware vCloud private cloud initiative.

Microsoft will likely leverage its Azure, .NET, Hyper-V, System Center, and PowerShell, as well as Windows Server and other software to deliver its private cloud play. In a blog post, Microsoft’s Steven Martin talks a bit about this. More on Microsoft’s plans is expected at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in November in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, VMware will likely leverage its vSphere, Spring Framework and tools, SpringSource Hyperic system management software and other secret sauce virtualization technologies to deliver the VMware private cloud solution.Resource Library:

In an interview with eWEEK, Mik Kersten, a Java developer, CEO of Tasktop and creator of the Eclipse Mylyn project, explained his view of the tooling part of the equation:

"In the past year Tasktop has been working closely with SpringSource on the cloud deployment tooling in the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). That has given me a perspective on how important virtualization is about to become to a large number of Java developers. Consider how the success of the Windows client and servers followed an investment in developer tools, APIs and the programming model for deploying to physical hardware. Virtualized infrastructure is replacing that physical hardware as the new deployment target, and Spring already has the hearts and minds of the majority of Java developers. With the acquisition, Spring developers can expect to start leveraging the profound capabilities of a virtualized infrastructure, while the tool support in STS will make it easy for them to deploy and manage applications in the cloud. This marks a big step forward for enterprise Java."

Indeed, a recent Evans Data survey indicated that a majority of developers chose Java as the top language for building private cloud applications, followed by Microsoft's C#.

Meanwhile, in a separate interview with eWEEK, Rod Johnson, CEO of what will become the SpringSource division of VMware, said, "When you look at the large enterprise market, which is our bread and butter, every CIO [Chief Information Officer] is trying to figure out their cloud strategy and what they can do behind their firewall to build their private cloud. And if they're in the enterprise they’re likely to be using Java. And if they're using Java they're likely to be using Spring. So you take the Java programming model with Spring and you combine it with our management offering (Hyperic) and the VMware virtualization platform. This gives the virtualization layer deep knowledge of what's happening inside the application at runtime."

Moreover, this integration builds naturally as the management software serves to promote a more "autonomic" and instrumented environment, and will enable the virtualization layer "to make decisions in real time" about things such as how many servers to add to support larger workloads, Johnson said. Other such decisions include: Which components need to be co-located on the same virtual server to minimize latency? What layer of the application or infrastructure is the bottleneck? Will increasing compute resources solve the problem, or are there other gating factors?

To the question of whether the VMware marriage with SpringSource is aimed primarily at Microsoft, Johnson told eWEEK:

"There's an industry wide shift toward cloud and the concept of Platform as a Service (PAAS). Microsoft clearly recognizes this. It's no longer about the operating system. As we said when we launched our Build/Run/Manage initiative at SpringSource a few months ago, Microsoft is one of the few companies with a credible, joined up message from developer desktop to data center and cloud. I see the relationship as one of ‘coopetition.’ There are areas in which SpringSource works together with Microsoft right now, and will potentially work together in the future, and we're keen to continue that as a division of VMware. We'll also continue our commitment to Spring.NET, which is growing in popularity."

So not only does Microsoft have reason for concern about this VMware/SpringSource PAAS play from a Java perspective, but perhaps the software giant might also have need for a casual concern from a .NET perspective to the extent that Spring developers begin to show interest in .NET (or .NET developers to show interest in Spring).

But that is further from the focus of this deal.

Moreover, not only does this deal put VMware in more competition with Microsoft, but it puts the virtualization juggernaut in the sights of Amazon, Salesforce.com and Google as well. Microsoft has .NET, Google has Python -- and to some extent Java -- but with this move, VMware is making a power play to claim the title of being the application platform for Java-based cloud development. If nothing else, this VMware deal could serve to stall CIO decisions about which direction to take in the cloud as the various contenders continue to build out their platforms.

Penguin Offers Cloud Computing for HPC

2009-08-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Linux cluster vendor Penguin Computing has created a cloud computing environment aimed at the HPC space. Penguin’s POD service is built on the vendor's Intel-powered Linux clusters, high-speed interconnect technologies like InfiniBand, NetApp SANs, Nvidia graphics chips and Penguin’s Scyld ClusterWare management software, all important technologies for highly parallel, memory-intensive HPC applications. Penguin also is not using virtualization technologies on its server clusters, which officials said will improve server and I/O performance.

Penguin Computing is creating a cloud environment specifically for the high-performance computing space.

Penguin Aug. 11 announced its POD (Penguin on Demand) service that is aimed at researchers, scientists and businesses that need extra compute power for their HPC applications or organizations that want HPC capabilities without having to incur the acquisition and maintenance costs of the cluster hardware.

Charles Wuischpard, president and CEO of the Linux cluster vendor, said Penguin officials saw a need for a cloud computing environment that was made for HPC applications. Popular public clouds, like Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) are good for the transaction-intensive, general-purpose applications, but are not made for the highly parallel tasks that are found in HPC environments.

“The workloads are different than what is on Amazon,” Wuischpard said in an interview.Resource Library:

Penguin has built a cloud computing service based in a colocation center in Utah that is made for those HPC workloads. POD is built out of highly optimized Linux clusters that are powered by about 1,200 processing cores of Intel’s Xeon 5400 processors. It also takes advantage of high-speed interconnect technologies, including InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet, and a high-speed NAS (network attached storage) from NetApp.

POD also comes with Penguin workstations powered by Nvidia’s Tesla graphics processors. In addition, Penguin is not virtualizing its servers, as is normally done at places like Amazon’s EC2. Instead, Penguin officials decided to offer customers all the resources of a server to increase performance and give businesses access to all the I/O, which is important when running the highly parallel, memory-intensive HPC workloads, Wuischpard said.

The result is that HPC workloads run as much as 30 times faster on the Penguin cloud computing service than on EC2. For example, one workload that takes 18 hours on EC2 can be completed in 30 minutes on Penguin’s POD.

“Amazon does an excellent job of catering to server-based workloads,” said Josh Bernstein, HPC architect and a principal designer of the POD technology for Penguin. However, its EC2 is not built for HPC tasks.

The entire environment is managed by Penguin’s Scyld ClusterWare software, and the vendor offers a variety of support services, including application set up, creating an HPC environment and ongoing maintenance. Penguin also is working with software makers who will offer their HPC software on POD.

POD is the latest step for Penguin officials in their efforts to focus the company on HPC. Since taking over the reins of the company two years ago, Wuischpard has shed a lot of Penguin’s ancillary Linux computing business to focus on HPC, a move he said has resulted in strong growth during that time.

Penguin’s POD is a further example of how Wuischpard and other officials are looking to expand the company’s reach.

“The way it changes our business is that it takes us out of the pure hardware game,” he said.

Numonyx CTO Lays Out Road Map for Phase-Change Memory

2009-08-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

Phase-change memory, which stands to replace DRAM and other components in digital devices during the next five years, offers a great deal of promise for the entire IT industry. It is blazingly fast, reliable and versatile. However, it is expensive, and in the current economic climate it has been a tough sell as a replacement technology.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Numonyx CTO Ed Doller laid out the differences in latencies between spinning disk hard drives, solid-state NAND flash drives and phase-change memory in terms that a lay person can readily understand.

"There are some very big differences, and processes in the future are only going to be demanding more speed," Doller told a near-capacity audience of several hundred people Aug. 11 in a keynote at the fourth annual Flash Memory Summit here at the Convention Center.

"I live in the world of milliseconds, nanoseconds and microseconds, but to normalize things, I'm going to make this more familiar to a wider audience," Doller said.

"Here it is: If I assume that random latency in a PCM device is one day—let's say it takes me one day to go to my PCM, get the information randomly and bring it back. In a solid-state drive, it [that same operation] would take 17 days to get that information back. How does that compare to a hard disk drive? Nine years!"

Doller then went a step further. "Let's say I'm going to put my PCM interface right on my processor, and I'm going to use PCM as storage-class memory—which means I'm going to execute code directly out of the PCM. Well, then it [the latency] goes from one day to 30 minutes," Doller said.Resource Library:

Therein lies the value of phase-change memory: speed that conventional data storage drives have never seen before—and never will.

A phase-change memory chip—it is also known as PRAM—is nonvolatile memory that works well for both executing code and storing large amounts of data, giving it a superset of the capabilities of both flash memory and dynamic random access memory. This means it can execute code with performance, store larger amounts of memory and also sustain millions of read/write cycles.

Intel debuted the first PCM chips at its developers' conference in San Francisco in September 2006.

The wafer shown to eWEEK that day represented Intel and Italy's ST Microelectronics' first grasp of the new type of nonvolatile memory chip. The two companies later merged to create Numonyx.

A great deal of development has been completed at Numonyx since then; Doller said that the adoption by mainstream IT companies has been slow but that it would take use by only a couple of big names—Apple and Microsoft would be two of them—for PCM to take off into the market stratosphere.

"PCM is on the verge, and we think it's inevitable that it will replace a lot of what is in devices today," Doller said. "But to start, it would take a company that is good at producing both hardware and software to make best use of it. It's bound to happen."

Adoption Curve Slow but Expected to Speed Up

Doller thinks PCM will need three to five more years to attain widespread adoption. Right now, the biggest drawback in PCM is the price, which is about 10 times higher than DRAM at this point. The pricing, however, will come down over time and as fabricating processes become improved.

PCM chips use the same material, chalcogenide, that is used inside to store data in rewritable optical disks. But instead of using a laser to change the properties of the material and thus create the zeros and ones that make up data, the chips use electricity that flows through a resistor. The resistor heats up and does the job of the laser, changing the materials' properties to represent a zero or a one.

The effort is the "culmination of [work by] some of the smartest materials guys on the planet," Doller said. "Over the years, this has an opportunity to be a very large memory technology."

Most industry people and analysts strongly believe PCM has the potential to replace both NAND—flash memory designed primarily for data storage—and NOR flash memory, designed for executing code with one type of chip, streamlining manufacturing processes.

PCM: 'Nirvana' for an Engineer

"PCM is like a superset of NOR or NAND flash," Doller said. "It's almost nirvana for an engineer. It reads fast, writes fast—it does everything faster."

Doller said the kind of speed PCM brings is going to be needed three to five years from now "just to index the Internet."

"We're bringing up a new generation that is used to instant-on," Doller said. "They expect to get things instantly.

"For example, my daughter was texting people on her iPhone instead of doing her homework recently. I asked her to stop texting her friends and go into her room, get on the PC and do her homework. She said, 'Dad, I am doing my homework.' Turns out she was doing it on her iPhone. She didn't want to use the PC because it took too long to spin up."

IBM Expands Relationships with Cisco, Juniper and Brocade

2009-07-23T10:25:00.002-07:00

IBM is building on its partnerships with networking vendors Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems in a push to advance its vision of a more integrated data center environment. The partnerships with Cisco, Juniper and Brocade range from OEM relationships to reseller deals. The announcement also is an indication of how IBM plans to differentiate itself from Cisco and Hewlett-Packard in a converged data center, with IBM relying more on offering customers flexibility and strong management software.

IBM is expanding its partnerships with networking vendors Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems in a move that should increase networking options for customers.

The enhanced partnerships, which include OEM and reseller agreements, are part of a larger strategy called the Data Center Networking initiative that was kicked off about two years ago, as IBM saw the need to reintegrate servers, storage devices and networking technology within the data center.

The deals, announced July 22, also are an indication of how IBM is going to differentiate itself from rivals such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard in the push to offer more converged data center solutions.

With Brocade, IBM is offering its first FCOE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) products in the form of the IBM Converged Switch B32 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet Converged Network Adapter for its Series x x86 servers. Those devices will be manufactured by Brocade, an expansion of the OEM relationship between the two companies for Fibre Channel and Ethernet offerings. The products are available immediately.Resource Library:

FCOE also is a factor in IBM's growing relationship with Cisco. Through the new deal, IBM's Systems and Technology Group sellers and partners will be able to resell Cisco's Nexus 5000 Series switches, which support 10G Ethernet, Fibre Channel and FCOE. These products will be available through IBM and its resellers starting in September.

For 25 things you may not know about IBM, please click here.

IBM also is entering into an OEM agreement with Juniper, with which IBM has had a reseller agreement. Under the new deal, IBM will rebrand and resell certain Juniper EX and MX switches and routers.

Jim Comfort, vice president of enterprise initiatives for IBM, said the new and enhanced deals will give IBM customers greater choice and flexibility as they look to update their data centers to handle the expected growth in traffic due to Web 2.0 technologies, the rise of cloud computing and other technological trends.

IBM will offer these networking devices with its own server and storage products, and will differentiate itself with its management capabilities through its Tivoli and Director software suites.

FCOE is a key standard that is emerging as the trend toward more converged data centers continues, Comfort said in an interview. IBM envisions a scenario of tightly integrated server, storage and networking devices that IT administrators handle through "very powerful management [software]," he said.

The variety of networking and other products within these integrated data center "pods" is also a key differentiator for IBM in comparison with what rivals are doing, Comfort said. Both Cisco and HP have rolled out all-in-one data center offerings that include servers, storage, networking and management software in a single package.

Cisco kicked off its UCS (Unified Computing System) strategy in March, a move that signaled a more expanded role in the data center. HP soon followed with its HP Matrix all-in-one offering.

Having options is important to customers, Mike Banic, vice president of product marketing for Juniper's Ethernet Platforms Business Group, said in an interview.

"Juniper always uses standard [technology]," Banic said. "That ability to offer choice and flexibility in conjunction with IBM is important."

Juniper's products are designed to increase networking capabilities while driving down costs in the data center, he said, adding that the company's offerings can drive down capital expenditures by as much as 68 percent, power and cooling costs by 43 percent each, and space used by 34 percent.

IBM's Comfort said helping businesses decrease operating costs also was key to the move toward a more integrated data center environment.

AMD Ships 500 Millionth Processor

2009-07-23T10:25:00.001-07:00

AMD, coming out a somewhat disappointing second quarter, announced the shipment of the 500 millionth x86 processor during the company’s 40 years in operation. To celebrate, AMD is running a contest in which customers can win one of four HP Pavilion notebooks. The announcement comes just days after AMD reported a $330 million loss, and just over a week after rival Intel posted strong second-quarter numbers.

Officials with Advanced Micro Devices are celebrating the shipment of the 500 millionth x86 processor.

The announcement is part of AMD’s ongoing touting of the company’s 40th year of existence.

AMD is noting the milestone by giving customers the chance to win one of four Pavilion dv2z ultra-thin notebooks from Hewlett-Packard. To win, customers need to follow AMD on Twitter (@AMD_Unprocessed), where a new question will be posted every other Monday beginning July 27. They can then send the answer through a direct message to AMD's twitter handle. The eligible respondents will be entered into a drawing for the HP notebooks.

More details can be found here.Resource Library:

The announcement of the 500 millionth chip shipped comes days after AMD officials announced second-quarter earnings that included a $330 million loss on revenue of $1.18 billion. The numbers beat analyst estimates, but were somewhat disappointing compared with the earnings rival Intel posted a week earlier.

Intel on July 14 announced a $1 billion profit on $8 billion in revenue, though that profit swung to a $398 million loss when the European Commission’s $1.45 billion antitrust fine was factored in.

European regulators levied the fine in May, saying that Intel unfairly used its market dominance to try to quash competition from AMD through rebates and discounts given to OEMs. Intel officially appealed the fine July 22.

Despite the second-quarter numbers, AMD has been on a roll in recent months. The chip maker in June rolled out its six-core “Istanbul” Opteron processor, some five months ahead of schedule, and officials have said the company will hit the timetables for other processors laid out in its product roadmap.

AMD was tripped by product delays and technical glitches in its quad-core “Barcelona” Opterons, but operational changes has allowed the chip maker to better stay on schedule since, particularly with its “Shanghai” and Istanbul offerings.

During the earnings call July 21, CEO Dirk Meyer said AMD will focus on its next-generation Opterons, and that by the fourth quarter, most of the server chips will be produced through the company’s 45-nanometer manufacturing process.

AMD also is scheduled to launch new platforms for laptops in the third quarter, including a new platform for what the company calls "thin and light" notebooks.

Graphics technology, based on AMD’s ATI graphics business, also will be a focus of the second half of 2009.

Windows 7 Release May Put the Brakes on Apple Enterprise Growth

2009-07-23T10:24:00.001-07:00

News Analysis: Apple's performance is besting the top companies in the tech industry. Apple market share, bouyed by sales of iPhones and iPods as well as Macintosh PCs, has grown substantially. Enterprises' rejection of Vista may have made it easier for Macs to inflitrate corporate offices. But that could change when Windows 7 is released later this year.

Apple announced its quarterly financial data Tuesday and once again, the company is performing extremely well.

According to Apple, its quarterly profit has risen to $1.23 billion, representing a 12 percent gain year-over-year. It beat Wall Street estimates on revenue and earnings per share. Once again, the company is one of the most profitable firms in the tech industry.

Apple's success is partly due to its vision. The company wasn't content to simply offer computers, so it analyzed the space and delivered compelling products that appeal to consumers across a wide array of markets. There's no debating that Apple has achieved its success in no small part because of the consumer appeal its products provide.
Resource Library:

But is that all? Is Apple enjoying this success solely because of its own vision? It's debatable. A quick glance at the company's financial data tells a slightly different tale: since the release of Windows Vista, Apple has been far more profitable than it was when XP was leading the charge. Granted, that's partly due to the success of the iPod and the release of the iPhone, but is there more to it than meets the eye?

Windows Vista was a nightmare for Microsoft. Designed to be the follow-up to Windows XP and the operating system to carry the Microsoft banner going forward, it failed in the enterprise. Most companies opted to stick with Windows XP out of fear that Vista's hardware requirements were too great. Worse, it suffered from compatibility issues when it was released, causing headaches for some companies when mission-critical applications stopped working on the new operating system.

It got so bad that Dell, HP, and other major vendors gave users the option to exercise "downgrade" rights, allowing customers to buy a Vista PC, but have the vendor install Windows XP instead.

The enterprise had two options after Vista was released: stick with outdated hardware until Windows 7 hit store shelves or venture into uncharted territory by buying Macs and deploying Mac OS X network-wide. For some firms, the latter option was impossible -- they were using applications that only worked with Windows. But other firms weren't tied down to a single operating system and opted instead to try out the Apple products. Since then, Apple's market share has grown consistently.

At the same time, Apple's iPod and iPhone business has grown, as well. Even consumer market share has grown in the same period. Part of that might be due to Windows Vista and Microsoft's many false starts.

But if there is a correlation between Mac sales and Windows Vista, wouldn't there also be a correlation between Mac adoption and Windows 7's success?

Windows 7 probably won't stop Apple's rise in the consumer space. The iPod and the iPhone are contributing heavily to its success and not even Windows 7 can stop that. But in the enterprise, it's entirely different. Those companies that moved to Mac OS X or are considering deploying Apple's operating system might need to think twice. Windows is still the leader in the enterprise for good reason. Unlike Mac OS X, Windows is the operating system platform for almost every software package designed for businesses. It's a more business-friendly operating system. Apple's Mac OS X doesn't enjoy those same benefits.

In the end, it's Windows 7 and its value that will dictate how well Mac OS X will perform in the enterprise going forward. If Windows 7 can live up to the hype, Apple's growth in the enterprise will be stymied. Companies that had thought about getting new hardware to replace their outdated XP computers will need to choose between Windows 7 or Mac OS X. As long as Windows 7 ships to the enterprise with as much value as Microsoft has promised, Mac OS X won't be the chosen operating system. Microsoft will be able to return to absolute dominance in the enterprise.

As long as Microsoft releases operating systems that don't quite match the requirements of the enterprise, companies will think twice about deploying Mac OS X. That's why Windows 7 is so important. If it can live up to its promise, companies will adopt it, they will opt for an HP, Lenovo, or Dell PC instead of a Mac, and Apple's growth in the enterprise will end.

Windows is an extremely powerful operating system. It dictates the enterprise market. It controls how companies do business. And, it seems, it plays a part in Apple's success. But with Windows 7 promising greater appeal than Vista, Apple might have enjoyed its best days in the enterprise.

How to Maximize Performance and Utilization of Your Virtual Infrastructure

2009-07-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Most Fortune 1000 companies today are currently between 15 to 30 percent virtualized. There are still a lot of obstacles to overcome in order to move more virtualization projects forward. The biggest virtualization challenge facing organizations is how to manage the virtual infrastructure. Here, Knowledge Center contributor Alex Bakman explains how IT staffs can dramatically improve performance and utilization efficiencies in their virtualization projects.

Organizations today are rapidly virtualizing their infrastructures. In doing so, they are experiencing a whole new set of systems management challenges. These challenges cannot be solved with traditional toolsets in an acceptable timeframe to match the velocity at which organizations are virtualizing. In a virtual server infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with proactive capacity management and proper allocation of shared resources.

The biggest challenge is finding the vast amount of time or automated technology to do this. Not allocating enough resources can cause bottlenecks in CPU, memory, storage and disk I/O, which can lead to performance problems and costly downtime events. However, over-allocating resources can drive up your cost per virtual machine, making a ROI harder to achieve and halting future projects.

To address this, organizations should consider a life cycle approach to performance assurance in order to proactively prevent performance issues—starting in preproduction and continually monitoring the production environments. By modeling, validating, monitoring, analyzing and charging, the Performance Assurance Lifecycle (PAL) addresses resource allocation and management. It significantly reduces performance problems, ensures optimal performance of the virtual infrastructure and helps organizations to continually meet service-level agreements (SLAs).Resource Library:

The following are the five components of the PAL. These components allow organizations to maximize the performance and utilization of their virtual infrastructures, while streamlining costs and delivering a faster ROI.

Component No. 1: Modeling

Modeling addresses preproduction planning to post-production additions, as well as changes to the virtual infrastructure. With capabilities to quickly model thousands of "what if" scenarios—from adding more virtual machines to changing configuration settings—IT staff can immediately see whether or not resource constraints will be exceeded and if performance issues will occur. In this way, modeling provides proactive prevention.

Four common modeling scenarios are:

1. See the effect on resource capacity and utilization of adding a new host/virtual machine or removing existing ones.

2. What will happen when a host is suspended for maintenance or a virtual machine is powered down?

3. Pre-testing VMotion scenarios to make sure sufficient resources exist.

4. How will performance be affected if resource changes are made to hosts, clusters and/or resource pools?

Component No. 2: Validating

While modeling "what if" scenarios is an important first step to continually ensuring optimal performance, it is equally important to validate that changes will not have a negative impact on infrastructure performance. Resource Library:

Validation spans between the modeling stage and the monitoring stage of the PAL, because it is equally critical to initially validate performance-impacting changes in preproduction, as well as to continually monitor and validate performance over time. If you cannot validate that a certain change will impact infrastructure performance in either a negative or positive way, there is significant risk to making that change.

Component No. 3: Monitoring

The ongoing monitoring of shared resource utilization and capacity is absolutely essential to knowing how the virtual environment will perform. When monitoring resource utilization, IT staff will know whether resources are being over or underutilized. Not allocating enough resources (based on usage patterns and trends derived from 24/7 monitoring) will cause performance bottlenecks, leading to costly downtime and SLA violations. Over-allocating resources can drive up the cost per virtual machine, making a ROI much harder to achieve.

By continually monitoring shared resource utilization and capacity in virtual server environments, IT can significantly reduce the time and cost of identifying current capacity bottlenecks that are causing performance problems, tracking the top resource consumers in your environment, alerting you when capacity utilization trends exceed thresholds, and optimizing performance to meet established SLAs.

Component No. 4: Analyzing

Proactive approaches based on trend and predictive analysis of the data being monitored can significantly reduce fear by providing ample warning (for example, alerting system administrators to potential problems as new conditions materialize). By knowing ahead of time what resource constraints may occur, IT can take the appropriate proactive measures to prevent the problems from happening—providing the necessary confidence to virtualize their critical applications.Resource Library:

There are two layers of analysis that can help deliver the information IT staffs need to instill confidence that their infrastructures will perform. The two layers are trend analysis and predictive analysis.

Trend analysis

While real-time monitoring tools can show spikes in resources consumption, those spikes may not have a drastic impact on performance or may only be one-time events. Trend analysis based on 24/7 monitoring of resource utilization provides visibility into how the virtual server environment is performing over time. Is resource utilization trending higher, lower or staying the same? Is it necessary to add more capacity or is there room to safely add more virtual machines?

Predictive analysis

By leveraging trend analysis and running the data through sophisticated mathematical engines, future problems can be predicted. This allows IT to take preventive and proactive actions now. If you knew in a certain amount of days that a problem may occur, you could prevent 90 percent of these performance problems from ever happening. Threshold alerts could be set to show that, in 30 days, a cluster will begin to run out of storage. By knowing that issue today—as opposed to when it happens—actions can be taken now to proactively increase storage allocations and prevent the future problem.

Sun, Fujitsu Launch Enhanced UltraSPARC Systems into Roiling Unix Market

2009-07-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

Sun and Fujitsu are offering improved performance and virtualization features for their UltraSPARC-based servers through the adoption of new processors and LDoms virtualization software. The rollout comes at a time when uncertainty surrounds the Unix space, with Oracle buying Sun and delays in Intel’s next-generation Itanium chip. At the same time, IBM is paving the way for its upcoming Power7 platform.

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu are rolling out enhanced UltraSPARC-based servers into a Unix market that could see continued shifting over the coming months.

Officials with Sun and Fujitsu July 21 boasted improved performance and virtualization capabilities in the systems, thanks to the addition of the 1.6GHz UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors and the latest release of Sun’s LDoms (Logical Domains) virtualization software, all of which are supported by Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system.

The enhancements enable enterprises to grow the performance and efficiencies of their data centers without having to increase their expenses, according to John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s Systems Group.

“We’ve got massive density already built in,” Fowler said in a statement. “It’s a great choice for both consolidation and the heavy lifting required by enterprise applications.”Resource Library:

The announcement comes at an interesting time for the Unix community. Oracle’s expected $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun—Sun shareholders approved the transaction July 16—brings into question the future of Sun’s Unix-based hardware portfolio, and Intel is still experiencing delays in releasing the next-generation “Tukwila” Itanium chip. Hewlett-Packard has standardized its high-end Integrity systems on Itanium, and it’s those Integrity systems that run HP’s Unix variant, HP-UX.

Twelve reasons why Unix isn't going to disappear -- and three reasons it might.

The announcement from Sun and Fujitsu also came the same day IBM began paving the way to its upcoming Power7 processor platform with the unveiling of an upgrade path from Power6, as well as a new virtualization management tool, called Systems Director VMControl. Power7-based IBM servers are expected to begin shipping in the first half of 2010.

“Unix systems customers currently face unprecedented uncertainties,” Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said in a report issued July 22. “Some of those are competitive, with most of the pressure coming from below in the form of increasingly able x86/64-based solutions. New-generation processors designed to support particularly robust virtualization, such as Intel’s Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) chips, are likely to ratchet-up the pressure even higher.”

However, much of the uncertainly is coming from within the Unix space, King said.

“On the RISC side of the market, Oracle’s brewing acquisition of Sun Microsystems has many in the industry questioning the company’s plans for or dedication to Sun’s UltraSPARC technologies,” King wrote. “Even if Oracle supports Sun’s traditional platforms and solutions and customers (as CEO Larry Ellison insists it will), many people doubt Oracle’s ability to effectively run, let alone turn around, Sun’s troubled hardware business.”

Given all that, it looks as though IBM is in the best position among Unix vendors, he said, noting that IBM could make big gains in the Unix space by taking advantage of issues around rivals such as HP and Sun. And while x86-based systems continue to grow as an overall percentage of the global server market, Unix-based systems still accounted for 33 percent—about $3.3 billion—of the overall server revenue in the first quarter of 2009, according to research firm IDC. That was up from 30.2 percent the first quarter of 2008.

Despite the questions surrounding the future of Sun hardware, Fujitsu officials said they are seeing continued adoption of the UltraSPARC-based servers across a wide range of companies, from smaller startups to larger enterprises.

“With the enhancements we’re announcing … we will be able to offer customers even greater performance and virtualization capabilities,” Noriyuki Toyoki, corporate vice president at Fujitsu, said in a statement.

Through the combination of LDoms 1.2 and Solaris, businesses get built-in configuration tools for a more streamlined setup of LDoms, as well as CPU power management through the automatic powering off of processing cores not in use.

Other capabilities include greater support of jumbo frames, which let businesses send more data across the network at one time, dynamic migration of domains, built-in recovery through automatic LDoms backup, and a physical-to-virtual migration tool for businesses looking to move from existing legacy SPARC/Solaris systems to the newer CMT (chip multithreading) servers.

Emerging Markets a Key for IT Hardware Vendors: Gartner

2009-07-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

In a recent survey, research firm Gartner found that larger enterprises in emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, China and India were more likely to increasing investments in IT hardware—including storage, servers, PCs and printing devices—than their counterparts in mature markets. They also are increasing investments in such as areas as virtualization, green IT and—to a lesser extent—cloud computing.

Emerging markets hold a lot of promise for IT hardware vendors, according to research firm Gartner.

In a report issued July 22, Gartner analysts said that in 2009, IT hardware spending growth rates in emerging markets will be larger than those in more mature markets.

In addition, spending in emerging markets on virtualization and cloud computing technologies also will increase, they said.

The trends were found in the results of a survey of 951 IT professionals in large enterprises worldwide. The results should impact where IT hardware vendors and their channel partners put their money and efforts, according to Gartner analyst Luis Anavitarte.Resource Library:

“These survey results are very important for technology and service providers, not only because they validate where the IT growth trend is occurring in emerging markets, but also because they can guide planning and resource allocation processes,” Anavitarte said in a statement. “This should also have an impact on hardware vendors’ channel strategies addressing large enterprises, particularly in Brazil, Russia, India and China.”

Overall, the survey found that 66 percent of those responding said there either would be an increase in IT budgets this year or no change from last year.

In each of four categories—storage, servers, PCs and printing devices—a greater percentage of respondents in emerging markets said they planning to increase spending on IT hardware or keep the same, as compared with their counterparts in mature markets.

For example, 33 percent of those in emerging markets said they planned to increase spending on storage hardware, compared with 27 percent in mature markets. In servers, 30 percent in emerging said they planned to spend more on servers, compared with 27 percent in mature markets.

For PCs, the split was 32 percent to 19 percent, while it was 28 percent to 16 percent for printing devices.

In addition, those saying their spending was going to remain the same as in 2008 was higher in each category for emerging market enterprises than those in mature markets.

In addition, 35 percent of respondents in emerging markets said they planned to increase investments in virtualization, 32 percent said they would do the same in green IT, and 7 percent said they’d invest more in cloud computing.

There are several reasons for this trend in emerging markets, including that many of these enterprises have IT plans in place that includes renewing hardware, as well as that they more financial resources than their SMB brethren and rely less on borrowing money to cover their IT operations.

In addition, according to Gartner, these larger enterprises more often play on an international stage and need to have top IT resources to compete on an international level.

Regarding virtualization, Gartner analysts are seeing more enterprises in emerging markets beginning to adopt the technology, and that interest in green IT will continue to grow in accordance with governmental regulations.

Cloud computing continues to be a new computing model in the emerging markets. According to the survey, half of the respondents in the emerging market organizations had not heard of cloud computing or had heard of it but didn’t know what it meant. Not all markets were like that, however. In Brazil, 28 percent of channels are delivering software as a service.

Storage virtualization software maker VMware reports profits of $33 million or 8 cents per share, compared with $52 million or 13 cents per share a ye

2009-07-23T10:13:00.002-07:00

Microsoft announces that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been released to manufacturing. In addition, Microsoft says it plans to release a family pack that would allow Windows 7 Home Premium to be installed on up to three PCs. Microsoft is presumably hoping that a high rate of adoption for its new products will improve its flagging finances.

Microsoft announced the release of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to manufacturing on July 22.

The two platforms represent a major part of Microsoft's grand strategy, as it seeks to capitalize on technological trends such as virtualization that are rapidly changing the face of IT. They also present a substantial chance for revenue generation during a period when the company finds itself fighting a substantial economic headwind. The release-to-manufacturing announcement came one day before Microsoft's planned quarterly earnings call on July 23.

In a July 21 corporate blog entry, Microsoft also confirmed that it would release a "family pack" for Windows 7 Home Premium in certain markets, which will allow installation on up to three PCs. Resource Library:

"We have heard a lot of feedback from beta testers and enthusiasts over the last three years that we need a better solution for homes with multiple PCs," Brandon LeBlanc, a Windows communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in the blog entry.

For the enterprise, Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to take advantage of Microsoft's Hyper-V technology in order to the growing trend toward virtualization. The server's 64-bit architecture takes advantage of virtualization's hungrier memory needs, and also includes features such as Live Migration, which can transparently move running guest systems between nodes inside a failover cluster without risk of dropping the network connection.

Click here for more information on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Through Windows Server 2008 R2, virtual machines support hot plug-in and hot removal of both virtual and physical storage without the need to reboot the physical host system. Processing to the physical host, including TCP/IP operations, is included in the Hyper-V abilities.

"We feel that this release specifically provides the catalyst for the customers who haven't embarked on the virtualization journey," Mike Schutz, director of product management for Microsoft's Windows Server Division, said in an interview with eWEEK. "Hyper-V does provide a low bar for entry as well as the ability to scale up to larger environments."

Microsoft is presumably hoping for quick adoption by businesses in order to provide a much-needed boost in revenue for the remainder of 2009. Earnings for the current quarter have been estimated at 36 cents a share on revenues of $14.37 billion, a 9.3 percent drop from the same quarter in 2008, when the company reported income of 47 cents a share on $15.84 billion of revenue.

In April, Microsoft posted its first-ever quarterly revenue decline, which saw its Windows-centric Client division's revenue drop by 16 percent and income by 19 percent year over year. If Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are substantial hits it could help negate the downward trend, especially if consumers and businesses are compelled to engage in a tech refresh.

VMware Profits Down 36.5% but Execs Optimistic for Rest of 2009

2009-07-23T10:13:00.001-07:00

Storage virtualization software maker VMware reports profits of $33 million or 8 cents per share, compared with $52 million or 13 cents per share a year ago. Overall revenue was flat at $456 million, but VMware's CEO and CFO are optimistic that good numbers lie ahead.

Enterprise virtualization software kingpin VMware on July 22 reported a 36.5 percent falloff in its second-quarter profit from the same period a year ago, but CEO Paul Maritz and his fellow executives remained optimistic about the company's prospects for the next six months.

VMware, which is owned and operated as an independent subsidiary by storage giant EMC, reported profits of $33 million or 8 cents per share, compared with $52 million or 13 cents per share a year ago. Overall revenue was flat at $456 million.

It is widely estimated that VMware's hypervisor, which enables data storage to be consolidated and carved up into workload units not bound by physical disk capacity, is used in about 80 percent of the world's enterprise IT systems.Resource Library:

"We managed to return a solid quarter, despite a very large product transition," Maritz said. "As far as our customers and ecosystem partners are concerned, it's been very positive.

"About 1,000 ecosystem partners, from very small ISVs to very large server vendors, have been working hard on getting their certifications for their products [on VMware's ESX and VSphere hypervisors] and releasing new products that use the VSphere foundation. This will all help build future bridges to the cloud. And it speaks to the product maturity we have."

VMware Chief Financial Officer Mark Peek told analysts and journalists on a conference call that VMware expects revenue to be slightly better at between $465 million and $480 million in the third quarter of 2009. Wall Street analysts' estimates are in the neighborhood of $474 million.

In after-hours trading July 22, VMware's stock price climbed about 7 percent to $33.60.

Cautious but optimistic

"Even though we remain cautious about the global economic conditions, we are beginning to get a somewhat better visibility into our business," Peek said.

Peek also said VMware expects revenue for its fiscal year 2009 to increase by 1 to 3 percent over its 2008 sales of $1.88 billion.

According to Peek, VMware's second-quarter services revenue increased by 32 percent from a year ago to $228 million, while license sales fell 20 percent, also to $228 million. A couple of major U.S. military-sector service deals were keys to the service revenue increase during the quarter.

rBuilder 5 Streamlines Linux-Based Appliance Deployment

2009-07-23T10:12:00.002-07:00

The 5.0 version of rBuilder boasts several major new features. eWEEK Labs' tests of the platform, through Version 5.2.1, shows that rBuilder makes it easier to churn out virtual machine images for immediate deployment, and that the Web-based management interface that rBuilder pairs with the appliances it creates is handy. However, Labs did run into some configuration issues, as well as some issues with the new Flash-based Web front end.

With its rBuilder 5.2.1, rPath aims to streamline the deployment and maintenance of application workloads by providing IT organizations with the tools to roll their applications into Linux-based software appliances that are ready to deploy on popular server virtualization platforms, cloud computing services or bare-metal systems.

Rather than manage the operating system, application and virtual container layers in separate processes, rBuilder enables organizations to fold these operations into a single system that pairs applications with "just enough" operating system components to meet their needs; that packages the application-plus-OS bundles into the formats required by various hosting platforms; and that keeps these appliances up-to-date with security and bug fix patches.

rBuilder Version 5.0, which was released in April, introduced several major new features, including additional Linux distribution options; a new, Flash-based interface; and a new management console through which administrators can directly manipulating appliances on various virtualization environments.

In my tests of rBuilder, which began with a pre-5.0 release of the product and ran through the current, 5.2.1 version, I was impressed by the ease with which I could churn out virtual machine images for immediate deployment on the Amazon EC2 and VMware ESX environments that I tapped for testing. I also appreciated the handy Web-based management interface that rBuilder pairs with the appliances it creates.

However, I found the process of getting my chosen applications configured properly much more complicated than the product's point-and-click graphical interface might suggest.

For my tests, I worked primarily with the Mediawiki application that powers Wikipedia--an application that I know can be implemented very well with rPath's tools because the company offers a freely available Mediawiki appliance for download from its site. The rPath-built Mediawiki appliance boasts an initial setup process that's folded into the appliance's Web management interface, and a slick backup option that covers both uploaded files and the Mediawiki database.Resource Library:

Building a Mediawiki appliance on my own was a much less streamlined affair. For example, while rBuilder managed to detect automatically and provide most of the OS dependencies that my test applications required, the product didn't catch everything on its own, and I couldn't tell if rBuilder had missed any required components without building and launching my appliances first. To get everything configured properly, I ended up having to cycle through the define, build and launch process many times, and spend time learning about rPath's conary recipe language to tweak my package definitions.

With that said, rBuilder is well worth evaluating, and rPath makes evaluations fairly easy to conduct. rBuilder is available in hosted and on-premises versions, and both flavors are freely accessible.

The on-premises version of rBuilder is free for use with up to 20 running virtual instances. The hosted version of rBuilder, called rBuilder Online, is completely free, but all appliances built and stored on rBuilder Online are publicly accessible.

Multiple Linux Platforms

rPath maintains its own Linux distribution, rPath Linux, from which rBuilder can pluck the components required to build software appliances. rPath Linux is a fairly conservative distribution that's capable of serving most Linux applications without issue.

However, for applications designed or certified to work on a specific distribution, using rPath's own Linux can pose support hurdles. It's in these cases that rBuilder's support for Linux distributions beyond rPath Linux comes in handy. rBuilder offers the choice of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 or 11, Ubuntu Hardy or the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 clone, CentOS 5. For the SLES options, you must configure rBuilder with an activation key confirming that you're entitled to run the distribution.

When I embarked on my appliance creation journey, rBuilder prompted me to choose one of these distributions. Later, I could easily switch platforms through the product's Flash-based interface. I switched appliances from rPath Linux 2 to CentOS and vice versa.

Virtualization Target Support

Also new in the 5.x versions of rBuilder is a management console through which I could configure virtualization host targets to link up with rBuilder. I could choose from on-premises VMware ESX Server or Citrix XenServer hosts, or the cloud-based Amazon EC2 or the Globus Workspaces Cloud. I tested with a VMware vSphere installation and with an Amazon EC2 account. In both cases, I could see a list of the running instances on the services, as well as launch or terminate new instances from rBuilder.

I could also create virtual images in a fairly comprehensive range of other formats, including those for Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Parallels, QEMU, installable DVD or CD ISOs and plain TAR archives.

Flash-based Interface

Among the most striking changes between the 4.x and 5.x versions of rBuilder is a move from an HTML and Javascript-based Web interface to a new Web front end built on Adobe's Flash framework. The Flash interface gives rBuilder a look and feel more akin to a regular desktop application, while retaining the cross-platform support of the HTML interface.

Overall, my experience with the new interface was positive. In my first experiences with the new UI, just after Version 5 became available, I was tempted to say that rPath had pushed the envelope a bit too far in terms of what’s feasible with a Flash-based application, but the company has managed to iron out most of the early wrinkles I encountered.

For example, while testing earlier 5.x builds of rBuilder, I experienced some performance issues with the Flash-based interface, which tended to result in my browser--and all its open tabs--locking up for short periods of time. Specifically, I experienced these problems while connecting to VMware ESX server targets. With Version 5.2.1 of rBuilder, those particular lockup issues seemed to have been ironed out.

However, there were some Flash issues even in Version 5.2.1. In one case, I triggered a build of one of my appliance images, but the operation wasn't reflected in the interface. I clicked a couple more times to launch the build, but it wasn't until I refreshed the page that I could see that each of my clicks had indeed added a new build process to the product's queue. The interface offered no option to cancel the redundant operations, so I had to either wait for them to finish or visit a separate rBuilder administration console to cancel them.

EMC Profits Fall 43 Percent

2009-07-23T10:12:00.001-07:00

Storage giant's earnings dropped to $205.2 million from $360.1 million in Q2 2008. Overall income was down 11 percent to $3.26 billion. However, CEO Joe Tucci was optimistic, saying he believes that a return to higher numbers may not be far away.

Storage giant EMC, which had enjoyed double-digit profits for 21 quarters up until this year, reported July 23 that it lost ground in Q2 2009 as its profit fell 43 percent from a year ago.

The company's virtualization subsidiary, VMware, reported a 36 percent drop in profits July 22. However, executives from both companies were optimistic, saying they believe that a return to higher numbers may not be far away.
Resource Library:

EMC's earnings dropped to $205.2 million [10 cents per share] from $360.1 million, or 17 cents a share, in Q2 2008. Overall income was down 11 percent to $3.26 billion.

Revenue from VMware added $455 million to EMC's total. As VMware had said a day before, EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci said that he believes that market stabilization may be near than many people think.

"When IT markets resume to more normal spending rates, we expect EMC will return to generating double-digit revenue growth," Tucci said told a conference call of analysts and journalists.

But in offering some guidance on the company's prospects, EMC signaled that the tech market is at least returning to more predictable conditions.

"While global conditions remain challenging and our full-year view of declining IT spending remains unchanged, EMC's second-quarter financial performance reflects customers' budget stabilization and improved business predictability," EMC Chief Financial Officer David Goulden said during the conference call.

"We now have better visibility and more confidence in the second half of 2009," Goulden said.

In its 2009 guidance, EMC forecast revenue of $13.8 billion, including its pending $2.2 billion acquisition of Data Domain. Thomson Reuters analysts projected 78 cents and $13.49 billion, Reuters reported.

Sun VirtualBox Virtualization Ready for Data Center

2009-07-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization platform, which until now could only run on a single x86 CPU and was good only for desktop applications, can now create and support up to 32 virtual CPUs in a single virtual machine, making it capable of handling server workloads like databases, and putting it in closer competition with virtualization technology from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. In addition, Sun has improved the graphics capabilities in VirtualBox for desktop applications.

Sun Microsystems’ VirtualBox virtualization platform is now ready for the data center.

VirtualBox 3.0, released by Sun June 30, can now run multiprocessor virtual machines for high-end workloads, according to company officials. Where the product in the past could only run on a single x86 processor, the new version can host up to 32 virtual CPUs in a single virtual machine, enough to accommodate such server-based workloads as databases and Web applications.

VirtualBox, which takes advantage of virtualization technology in x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, can now work in the data center as well as the desktop.Resource Library:

"The rapid evolution and proliferation of VirtualBox software continues," Jim McHugh, vice president of marketing for data center software at Sun, said in a statement. "With each new version, VirtualBox software delivers more innovation, performance and power. And as virtualization continues to gain momentum in the market, the world's developers and IT decision makers are turning to VirtualBox en masse."

The new capabilities bring Sun’s virtualization platform into the realm of those from VMware, Citrix Systems and Microsoft.

Sun, which gained the VirtualBox technology through its 2008 acquisition of Innotek, has rapidly ramped the platform’s capabilities, rolling out beta versions less than a month ago.

Along with the new server capabilities, Sun engineers have enhanced the platform’s desktop features, including improved graphics through added Microsoft Direct3D support for Windows guests. In addition, VirtualBox 3.0 supports Version 2.0 of the OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) standard, enabling high-performance Windows, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris graphical apps to run software that normally would need graphical hardware acceleration.

VirtualBox 3.0 also supports a wider range of USB devices, including storage devices, Apple iPods and cell phones.

Cisco, VMware Look to Move VMs Between Data Centers

2009-07-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

Cisco and VMware are working on a proof-of-concept around the idea of using VMware’s VMotion technology to move live virtual machines between multiple data centers, a capability that would aid in such areas as load balancing, data center maintenance and disaster avoidance. The two companies demonstrated the proof-of-concept during the Cisco Live show. However, VMware officials warn that more work needs to be done to make the concept a reality.

Cisco Systems and VMware are developing ways that enterprises can use VMware’s VMotion technology to move live virtual machines from one data center to another.

The two companies showed off a proof-of-concept at the Cisco Live 2009 show in San Francisco, and demonstrated the capabilities during Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior’s keynote address July 2.

The project is still in the proof-of-concept stage, but VMware official Guy Brunsdon said in a recent blog post that moving live virtual servers to other locations over a WAN holds promise for businesses in a number of areas.

In particular, the capability would help enterprises in load balancing compute resources over multiple sites, Brunsdon said in his blog posted June 29. Businesses also could save power and cooling costs by being able to dynamically consolidate VMs to fewer data centers, he said.Resource Library:

In addition, businesses could avoid downtime during maintenance procedures in data centers by migrating applications offsite, and they also could more easily avoid natural disasters by proactively migrating important application running on VMs to another facility.

VMotion has worked well in migrating live VMs from one host to another. In addition, VMware offers disaster recovery capabilities with its vCenter Site Recovery Manager, which enables businesses to improve their disaster recovery capabilities through automating recovery steps, testing recovery plans without interrupting the VMs, and providing steps for building and managing disaster recover plans.

However, there are particular challenges to the idea of moving live virtual servers from one site to another, Brunsdon said.

“This, of course, is a non-trivial thing to do,” he wrote. “There is the challenge of moving a VM over distance (which involves some degree of additional latency) without dropping sessions. To maintain sessions with existing technologies means stretching the L2 domain between the sites—not pretty from a network architecture standpoint. And then there is the storage piece. If you move the VM, it has to remotely access its disk in the other site until a Storage VMotion occurs.”

For example, both the data center maintenance and disaster avoidance scenarios would require a Storage VMotion to move the disk image to the other data center.

Cisco and VMware engineers last year began working on the idea of moving VMs over long distances between multiple data centers, Brunsdon said. The joint Cisco-VMware lab in San Jose, Calif., has run several tests of disparate distances, he said. The demonstration at Cisco Live covered a distance of about 50 miles, he said.

According to a diagram of the San Jose-to-San Francisco test, the San Jose site includes VMware ESX servers and Catalyst 6500 switches from Cisco. At the San Francisco site were ESX servers and Cisco’s Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches.

Linking the two sites was an 80-kilometer single-mode optical fiber.

Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, said disaster recovery is a benefit that VMware has been touting with virtualization for several years.

A key benefit is the ability to create a disaster recovery plan that doesn’t entail spending the money to buy compute resources and having them sit idle in case of an emergency, Haff said. Virtualization enables businesses to work with the systems they have and use VMs for disaster recovery needs.

“You can use most resources normally most of the time,” he said. “But in the case of a problem, you can shift resources, but you don’t have a lot of idle resources.”

Five Continuing Trends in Data Storage

2009-07-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

As we do at six- or 12-month intervals here at eWEEK, we offer a short list of key continuing trends in data storage, based upon daily conversations with storage vendors, analysts, data center managers, CIOs and CTOs -- even a few former industry executives now blissfully retired and simply watching this evolution with continued amazement.

Data storage historically has been thought of as a solid, super-important but not-very-exciting sector of IT. Well, "not-very-exciting" is a value judgment made strictly in the mind of the beholder, and storage certainly is not a newsless valley in the overall IT landscape.

New products with a connection to data storage, data disaster recovery, deduplication, thin-provisioning, capacity management and a slew of others are constantly coming into the market -- from established companies and newbies alike. Storage media, including spinning disk hard drives, solid-state NAND and NOR Flash, digital tape and optical disks continue to become more capacious and reliable as engineers and manufacturers improve upon improvements.

As we do at six- or 12-month intervals here at eWEEK, we offer a short list of key continuing trends in data storage, based upon daily conversations with storage vendors, analysts, data center managers, CIOs and CTOs -- even a few former industry executives now blissfully retired and simply watching this evolution with continued amazement.
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Ever-increasing capaciousness in the hardware: Capacities in new-generation hard disks, NAND and NOR Flash, digital tape and optical disks continues to skyrocket, thanks to brilliant engineering. As millions more transistors are crammed onto silicon chips at Intel, AMD, Samsung and other processor-makers, increasing storage space is being created for all the forms that hold bits and bytes. There's a physical limit, but we're not anywhere near it yet, experts say.

For example, laptops with 1TB storage drives are only months away from general availability.

Virtualization of formerly siloed storage systems: This trend started with testing and quality assurance work back in the mid-2000s but is now trending very quickly up. Many of these siloed systems -- especially in larger enterprises -- are still in transition, but industry analysts now estimate that some sort of virtualization is now being used in production in nearly 90 percent of all enterprise IT systems. Only two years ago that percentage was in the 20s.

Standardization of deduplication in Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage: Where new-generation deduplication was a new and more-or-less experimental feature three years ago and being offered by only a handful of storage providers (two of them were Avamar, now property of EMC, and RockSoft, bought by ADIC, which was in turn bought by Quantum), it is pretty much a standard requirement now.

Data deduplication, one of the most important breakthroughs in IT in the last two decades, eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device in order to lower storage space requirements, which in turn lowers data center power and cooling costs and lessens the amount of carbon dioxide produced to generate power to run the hardware.

What's not to like about dedupe? If you said or thought "nothing," you're right.

Online backup storage: Small and medium-size businesses and departments of large enterprises alike are now signing on in increasing numbers to services such as Mozy.com, Carbonite, Box.net, Amazon S3, CommVault, Asigra, iDrive, Iron Mountain Digital, Seagate EVault, and others. It took a couple of years for trust to become established -- and trust is still by far the biggest issue -- but reports of serious data loss have been relatively few and far between.

It won't be long before every laptop and netbook sold will feature a pre-install that will include online backup and virus protection. EMC is already providing this with its Atmos service for its Iomega desktop storage drives.

Secure, private cloud storage: Don't confuse this with online backup. In the last eight months, EMC, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Symantec, CA and ParaScale joined the quickly expanding market for software that enables companies to build their own private cloud computing environments. Those vendors introduced separate do-it-yourself cloud-building platforms, sparking a trend that includes such businesses as 3tera and Citrix, in addition to lesser-known smaller companies such as Nirvanix, Bycast, and Cleversafe.

FAA Gets Its New Virtualized Flight Plan System Off the Ground

2009-07-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

EXCLUSIVE: The FAA, which has suffered a series of embarrassing flight plan system crashes during the last several years, has upgraded its legacy flight plan filing system to a new open-systems server and storage infrastructure supplied by Stratus Technologies. This architecture is now replacing critical systems that directly affect all air travelers in the United States.

The people whose job it is to schedule aircraft for takeoff, help guide passengers to their destinations and get them safely back down on the ground finally have some powerful new open-standards computer systems up and running to help them do their work more reliably.

The Federal Aviation Administration has endured a lot of grief in the last 24 months due to some well-documented crashes of its national flight plan-filing system. But the nation's No. 1 aerospace agency is finally bringing its Cold War-era mainframe IT systems into the 21st century.

Last year, the FAA upgraded its legacy internal business systems to a new open-systems server and storage infrastructure supplied by Sun Microsystems and an IP network provided by Cisco Systems. These systems currently handle all the agency's nonflight-related administrative functions, including the FAA's human resources information, e-mail, messaging, internal document routing and storage. The open systems worked well there, and the idea was to transfer the same kind of system to the all-important national flight-plan function.

NADIN's (National Airspace Data Interchange Network's) old mainframe-based system, an integral part of the overall NAS (National Air Space) traffic system that processes an average of 1.5 million messages per day, was obsolete and was beginning to break down due to technical issues. Travel disruptions due to these breakdowns are not out of the ordinary, according to knowledgeable air industry sources.Resource Library:

As a result, industry analysts and a number of former FAA staff members worried about major air traffic stoppages, as was demonstrated three times last summer by the crash of the system head in Atlanta. They also were concerned about increasing vulnerability to terrorist cyber-attacks.

An example of this happened on Aug. 26, 2008, when a corrupt file entered the flight plan system and brought it down for about 90 minutes during a high-traffic period late in the day on the East Coast. This was not an isolated incident, as the FAA's chief administrator originally had told the media. Similar crashes occurred on Aug. 21 and in June 2008, FAA records show.

International intelligence analytical firm Stratfor reported a similar system outage back in 2000. Another was reported in June 2007 in addition to the Aug. 21 and Aug. 26 crashes. Those are the ones we know about; we don't know how many others were never made public information.

"The lack of redundancy and dynamism demonstrated ... by the latest NADIN crash makes a cyber-attack against critical U.S. infrastructure all the more feasible," Stratfor said at the time in an editorial commentary.

But all of these issues may now be in the past. It took a grand total of about five years, but the FAA has done its research, found several million dollars to pay for new hardware, software and services, and is well into the process of updating all of its systems.

"We've just about finished our transition from the legacy system over to the new system," FAA IT administrator Jim McNeill told eWEEK. "The main new system is for NADIN, built on Stratus Technology servers with virtualization, and handles all the legacy [mainframe] functions as well as new FAA-owned IP systems."

Key Requirement: Separate Data Flows

McNeill said there was a key requirement that had to be met in order for the new system to comply with FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002) regulations: The FAA had to separate government-created data from non-government data.

"We were required to provide a separate server to support public data flows, due to the inherent security issues in TCP/IP," McNeill said. "In this interpretation, 'public data flows' means non-NAS systems. In the nature of our business, a lot of our clients are non-NAS systems; we're dealing with airlines, we have connections to 26 international agencies—these are all non-NAS systems. Basically, they're all private companies who provide value-added services to general and commercial aviation.

"What we're doing is providing a portal into the FAA system for these general and commercial aviation companies to file all flight plans, and keeping it separate from everything else."

The new, virtualized system—the first for the FAA—is built on new heavy-duty Stratus FTserver 6400s, which run on Intel Xeon quad-core processors. The system was designed by Lockheed Martin engineers, replacing two 21-year-old Phillips DS714 mainframes—located in Atlanta and Salt Lake City—that first went live in 1989 and have been cranking away ever since.

Overall, the old Phillips mainframes did yeoman's work on a 24/7 basis for two decades—ingesting, storing and processing an average of 1.5 million data points per day. The system and its designer deserve kudos for working all those years, but just like people, every system needs to be replaced at some point.

SMP-Enabled Sun xVM VirtualBox 3.0 Turns Up the Heat on VMware

2009-07-09T08:08:00.001-07:00

Version 3.0 of Sun's xVM VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool adds support for multiple guest processors--a major feature addition that, when considered alongside the product's low cost (free) and broad host platform support, is certain to give VMware Workstation a run for its money.

Sun Microsystems' xVM VirtualBox, a no-cost virtualization tool that enables virtual machines to run on a variety of standard operating systems, continues to improve its position as a potential challenger to workstation products from VMware and Parallels.

Sun released Version 3.0 of xVM VirtualBox on June 30 and added symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) as the major new feature.

I tested VirtualBox 3.0 on a Sun Fire x4170 server running Windows Server 2008 64-bit and equipped with 12GB of RAM and two quad-core Intel Xeon x5570 "Nehalem" processors. On this machine, I was able to create guests with up to 16 virtual CPUs by taking advantage of hardware-enabled hyperthreading. I also tested it on a Lenovo T400s laptop running Windows Vista and equipped with an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM, and on a Mac mini running OS X to run Windows XP.Resource Library:

Check out images of VirtualBox 3.0 here.

In all cases, xVM VirtualBox installed and ran without problems. When I tried to assign virtual processors to a guest on the Lenovo notebook I was warned to enable I/O APICs (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controllers) to avoid IRQ sharing.

xVM VirtualBox did not prevent me from assigning more virtual processors than were available on the physical host. In the case of the Sun Fire x4170 I was able to assign 32 virtual cores to a guest even though that was twice the number of available cores. And even that was "cheating" by using hyperthreading to double my eight physical cores. The user documentation clearly indicated that virtual cores should not exceed actual available physical cores.

Aside from SMP, xVM VirtualBox consists mostly of tweaks to existing features, including experimental support for hardware 3-D acceleration by supporting DirectX 8/9 and OpenGL programming interfaces. While "no cost" is the most compelling reason to look at xVM VirtualBox, the addition of SMP support along with the relatively quick tempo of product development—Version 2.2.4 was released at the end of May—recommends the product as a serious platform of IT pros.

Beyond the feature additions and improvements, there is a long list of bug fixes that include patches for various guest performance problems and for issues regarding the way VirtualBox handles the importing and exporting of OVF (Open Virtualization Format) virtual appliances. For the full list of VirtualBox 3.0 changes, see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog.

In addition to Windows and OS X, VirtualBox supports Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris as host operating systems. VirtualBox is available for free download at http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

Vizioncore Offers Data Protection Pack

2009-07-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

Cost-conscious businesses might look to Vizioncore's data protection pack, which is available in two bundles and is specifically targeted at smaller deployments.

Virtualization data protection and management solutions company Vizioncore, a subsidiary of Quest Software, announced the availability of SMB Data Protection Pack, a new sales offering aimed at small to medium-size businesses that have adopted, or are considering, VMware vSphere Essentials.

The SMB Data Protection Pack provides SMB customers with solutions such as data protection, high availability and offsite replication that will extend, enhance and complement the entry-level, all-in-one VMware vSphere Essentials offering. The company said the new pack is specifically targeted at smaller deployments and includes licenses for six CPUs, equivalent to the VMware vSphere Essentials license. Resource Library:

The SMB Data Protection Pack is available in two bundles. The primary bundle includes Vizioncore vRanger Pro for data protection and Vizioncore vControl for high availability, while the comprehensive edition, Vizioncore SMB Data Protection Pack with Replication, offers vRanger Pro and vControl, but also adds the additional protection and security of Vizioncore vReplicator for offsite disaster recovery replications. Both bundles are exclusively designed to be implemented with a single deployment of VMware vSphere Essentials.

“Procuring good technology for an SMB can often mean paying for solutions that may never be fully utilized,” said Vizioncone’s vice president of products Tyler Jewell. “However, when teamed with VMware vSphere Essentials, Vizioncore’s new SMB Data Protection Pack provides a truly pragmatic and unique set of solutions that directly results in easier management and greater protection of IT systems and, ultimately, richer ROI from virtualization initiatives.”

Bas Ter Heurne, sales manager for PQR, a specialist for professional ICT infrastructures, focusing on storage, virtualization and application delivery solutions, said the new solution pack from is a great way for small businesses to build their virtual infrastructures by obtaining needed management functionality in a cost-effective way.

“VMware vSphere is undoubtedly a great step forward in the world of technology development and there have been many improvements over the last version. However, the SMB Data Protection Pack from Vizioncore offers SMBs sophisticated enterprise-level features and functions in products that are both easy to master and affordable,” he said. “Any business now can really leverage their investments in virtualization for major gains in productivity and flexibility, as well as strategic benefits in such areas as data protection.”

In June, Vizioncore announced updates to two of its key products, vOptimizer Pro 2.2, the company’s storage and VM optimization tool, and vFoglight 5.2.6, an updated version of their performance monitoring solution. With vFoglight, administrators can view their infrastructure through detailed architectural representations and use out-of-the-box alerts and advice to detect, diagnose and resolve problems affecting performance and availability, while vOptimizer gives SMBs the ability to scan their organization’s VMware vCenter Server and ESX Hosts in order to determine the amount of over-allocated virtual storage that exists unnoticed.

EMC Leapfrogs NetApp, Ups Bid for Data Domain to $2.1 Billion

2009-07-09T08:06:00.002-07:00

With the fear of federal antitrust challenges in the rearview mirror, EMC is upping its offer for data deduplication specialist Data Domain to $2.1 billion. The increased offer is the latest move in a back-and-forth between EMC and NetApp, which last offered $1.9 billion for Data Domain. However, the tug-of-war could be coming to an end, some analysts say. EMC is offering more money in its all-cash deal than NetApp, and the FTC’s decision to remove all antitrust impediments means EMC can close the deal faster than NetApp. NetApp's CEO said the company is weighing its options.

EMC, given the green light by federal regulators to pursue its acquisition of Data Doman, is upping its bid for the storage deduplication company.

EMC is growing its offer for Data Domain by more than 11 percent, to about $2.1 billion, in a bid to push the issue and to thwart an attempt by rival NetApp to buy the company.

In a letter dated July 6, Joe Tucci, chairman, president and CEO of EMC, told Data Domain Chairman Aneel Bhusri that not only is EMC willing to up its offer, but that it also can close the deal within two weeks—earlier than NetApp’s proposal—and removes any deal protection provisions that could have slowed the process. Such provisions would include a break-up fee obligation, for example.

“This last point is very significant to you and your stockholders,” Tucci said. “Data Domain does not have any justification for continuing deal protection provisions for NetApp or any other party given our willingness to proceed without them. It was questionable agreeing to deal protections in your initial agreement with NetApp, when you knew of our interest in acquiring the company. There is no basis for continuing with them now.”Resource Library:

EMC’s increased bid is the latest move in a drama that started in May, when NetApp offered to buy Data Domain for $1.5 billion. The two suitors have gone back and forth over their attempts to buy Data Domain, though it appears that the competition may be coming to an end, according to Gartner analyst Roger Cox.

“It would be hard to see [the Data Domain board] turning this down,” Cox said. “From a pure cash point of view, EMC has more cash than the other guy does.”

EMC is offering more money than NetApp, and is offering an all-cash deal. That combined with the decision by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission—which had reviewed the proposed deal for antitrust issues—to remove all regulatory challenges and give a quick go-ahead to EMC to pursue the deal is enabling Tucci to promise Data Domain shareholders a quick closing to the deal.

NetApp initially offered $1.5 billion for Data Domain, then upped its offer to $1.9 billion after EMC’s first proposal of $1.8 billion. NetApp’s offer is a combination of cash and stocks.

“We continue to believe that a business combination with EMC will deliver substantial and superior benefits to your company’s stockholders, customers, employees and partners,” Tucci said in his letter to Bhusri. “Since June 1st, when we submitted to you our prior proposal, we have received wholehearted support from many of your stockholders and customers validating our confidence in these benefits.”

In a written response, Dan Warmenhoven, chairman and CEO of NetApp, said the company is reviewing what its next steps should be.

"In response to EMC's revised, unsolicited offer, the NetApp Board of Directors will carefully weigh its options, keeping in mind both its fiduciary duty to its stockholders and its disciplined acquisition strategy," Warmenhoven said.

At the center of the bidding war is Data Domain’s market-leading data deduplication technology. Data dedupe, a relatively new technology that is getting a lot of attention from enterprises, helps eliminate redundant data from a disk storage device, which in turn lowers storage space requirements and data center power and cooling costs. It also helps businesses reduce the carbon footprints of their data centers.

EMC already offers data deduplication capabilities through an OEM relationship with Quantum, though acquiring Data Domain could put that relationship at risk, Cox said. Acquiring Data Domain would enable NetApp to expand on its deduplication capabilities, he said. NetApp says that data deduplication is a key component of its OnTap operating environment.

In addition, it would expand NetApp’s customer base and help it significantly grow its sales force by 20 to 25 percent, he said. Data Domain currently has a sales force of more than 400 people, according to Cox.

For EMC, a key reason for buying Data Domain would be to keep NetApp from acquiring the company and growing stronger, he said.

Cox said he doesn’t expect any other suitors for Data Domain to emerge. IBM bought deduplication vendor Diligent Technologies last year, and Hewlett-Packard is “a long shot” to make a bid, he said.

CA Expands Support for VMware vSphere, Cisco Virtual Switches

2009-07-09T08:06:00.001-07:00

By enhancing several software offerings with support for VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization platform and Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switches, CA is looking to ease enterprise management of virtualized and cloud computing environments. CA officials say technologies like those from VMware and Cisco are quickly blurring the line between physical and virtual environments, and enterprises need tools that can allow them to manage both environments from a single place.

CA is looking to make it easier for enterprises to manage their virtualized data centers and cloud computing environments by enhancing the capabilities of several software solutions to support VMware's vSphere 4 virtualization platform and virtualized network switches from Cisco Systems.

CA announced July 6 that is expanding the reach of its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager to create a single, fully integrated management offering for physical and virtual server and network environments. In addition, the solution will manage databases, voice and UC (unified communications) systems, and other networked applications.

Key to the enhanced offering is support for vSphere 4 and Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual software switch, which can be integrated as an option into vSphere 4. Resource Library:

The move is part of CA's Lean IT initiative, designed to help businesses lower IT costs while improving performance and efficiency.

"With the integration of the Cisco Nexus 1000V and VMware vSphere 4, the lines between physical and virtual network and systems management have blurred," Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager of CA's Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit, said in a statement. CA support for the two products "will provide a unique, highly integrated, closed-loop approach to business service assurance and automation."

The new support for the VMware and Cisco products in Spectrum Infrastructure Manager and eHealth Performance Manager will result in improved event correlation and root cause analysis, as well as the ability to identify performance issues in virtualized and cloud computing environments before those problems can impact services, according to CA.

They also will provide interactive reporting capabilities for troubleshooting and historical trend reports to help enterprises in their capacity planning.

The software also will offer consolidated hierarchical views of VMware vCenter Server hosts, data centers, compute clusters, and virtual switches and machines, and will provide an improved automated discovery of physical and virtual network and compute systems.

The software also will detect and track VMotion migrations of VMs from one host to another.

VMware Looks to Lure Virtual Iron Users from Oracle

2009-07-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

VMware is hoping to entice Virtual Iron customers away from Oracle, which bought Virtual Iron in May. Oracle reportedly is telling Virtual Iron partners that it is halting development of Virtual Iron products and will integrate the technology into its own Oracle VM platform. VMware is offering discounts on products, including its new vSphere 4 virtualization platform, to Virtual Iron customers.

VMware is offering discounts on products, including its new vSphere 4 virtualization platform, to customers of Virtual Iron, the virtualization company bought by Oracle in May.

VMware on June 7 unveiled what it calls “safe passage” to Virtual Iron customers in the wake of reports that Oracle will shut down development of existing Virtual Iron products, opting instead to absorb those products into its own Oracle VM virtualization platform.

The virtualization technologies from both Oracle and Virtual Iron are based on Xen, the open-source hypervisor.

Oracle reportedly sent a letter in June to Virtual Iron partners saying that it not only is ending development of the company’s virtualization products, but is also stopping the delivery of orders to new customers.Resource Library:

CA enhances its support for VMware's vSphere 4 and Cisco virtual switches.

In announcing the new incentive program for Virtual Iron customers, VMware officials emphasized their company’s breadth of virtualization products and stable road map as enticements to move away from Oracle.

Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, also said that VMware has is previous successes to fall back on, including all the global enterprises that now run VMware virtualization technology. That could be a big selling point as Virtual Iron customers decide in which direction to head, particularly in a case like this, where the acquiring company has decided to end development and support of the products bought in the deal.

"If migrating to a new platform is required, why not consider an entirely new vendor as well?" King said in a report issued July 8. "That ... is precisely what VMware has in mind for Virtual Iron's cleintele."

The program—which includes price discounts—covers those Virtual Iron customers with current license and support contracts. The VMware products included in the program are VMware vSphere 4 Advanced Edition, VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus Edition, VMware vCenter Server Foundation and VMware vCenter Server Standard.

The Virtual Iron customers also are eligible for discounts on support and subscription on those products. To take advantage of the program—which runs through Sept. 30—Virtual Iron customers need to show proof of a current VI license and support contract.

The way Oracle is handling the Virtual Iron acquisition could have a ripple effect on the company in several areas moving forward, according to King. Virtual Iron had anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 customers, and it's no sure bet that they will stay with Oracle and its virtualization technology, he said.

In addition, the seemingly heavy-handed way Oracle with dealing with this acquisition is reminiscent of its PeopleSoft acquisition, King said. Overall, some comapnies like IBM and EMC have done a better job handling the post-acquisition tasks than Oracle, he said.

It also could give some pause to Sun Microsystems customers. Oracle is expected to complete its acquisition of Sun this summer -- Sun investors are slated to vote on the $7.4 billion deal July 16 -- and while Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said that Sun's products will be well taken care of by Oracle, the company's handling of Virtual Iron will be closely watched, but rivals as well as customers.

"It would not be surprising if Sun customers monitor the Virtual Iron situation closely, or if Sun's competitors seek to turn any Oracle missteps into commercial opportunities for themselves," King wrote.

Analysis: EMC or NetApp Will Pay Way Too Much for Data Domain

2009-07-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

Analysis: EMC or NetApp Will Pay Way Too Much for Data Domain

UPDATED: Industry analysts who read/research/blog/report on these things tell eWEEK they are generally in agreement: The corporate battle between NetApp, the original mover in the Data Domain sweepstakes, and outsider EMC has gotten way, way out of hand. Whichever company eventually makes the purchase will be paying far too much for what amounts to one point product.

Is EMC allowing its considerable corporate ego to gain control in a non-solicited campaign to acquire Data Domain? And why does it want to add a feature—deduplication—that it already has in spades in its voluminous catalog?

Industry analysts who read/research/blog/report on these things tell eWEEK they are generally in agreement: The corporate battle between NetApp, the original mover in the Data Domain sweepstakes, and outsider EMC has gotten way, way out of hand. Whichever company eventually makes the purchase will be paying far too much for what amounts to one point product.

However, most people agree that Data Domain has an excellent brand of deduplication—dedupe, as it is commonly called. Now both competitors want that golden software inside their walls to sell to the midsize- and small-business market, which has a considerable upside.

Data deduplication eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device in order to lower storage space requirements, which in turn lowers data center power and cooling costs and lessens the amount of carbon dioxide produced to generate power to run the hardware.
Resource Library:

EMC already has three brands of deduplication at its disposal: Avamar, which it acquired in 2006 for $165 million, and licensing agreements with Quantum and FalconStor -- the latter for its virtual tape library, which contains dedupe software. All are highly respected brands. The prevailing thought is that EMC covets Data Domain's brand and also doesn't want NetApp to own it. Some analysts believe that EMC eventually may have to make some hard decisions on exactly how many versions of dedupe it really needs. Nothing yet has been said on the record about that, however.

Data Domain shareholders are in a rather cozy situation. Let's see, which offer might they accept—$1.9 billion cash and stocks from NetApp, or the latest counter-offer: $2.1 billion cash (an 11 percent premium) on July 6 from big, bad EMC?

Two hundred million dollars more to fill shareholders' bank accounts carries a bit of weight in anybody's business.

NetApp and Data Domain employees and board members, mostly Californians, have gone on record to say that they prefer each other as colleagues, largely because the stiffer culture of Boston-based EMC would not be quite as pleasant a workplace experience. It is also generally agreed that the product lines of NetApp and Data Domain dovetail better than Data Domain's with EMC.

Meanwhile, Data Domain shareholders are getting giddy about their investment. The stock was selling at $12.62 on April 7, 2009; it closed today at almost three times that at $34.

After the news of EMC's second offer broke July 6, NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven didn't have a comment other than to say that he and company board members are reviewing their options at this time.

EMC President, CEO and Chairman Joe Tucci told Data Domain Chairman Aneel Bhusri via a letter dated July 6 that not only is EMC willing to increase its offer by about $200 million, but that it also can close the deal within two weeks—far earlier than NetApp can—and remove any deal protection provisions that could slow the process. The Federal Trade Commission already has blessed the EMC proposal as being acceptable as far as antitrust issues are concerned.

Is Data Domain Being Overvalued?

Analysts contacted by eWEEK were in accord on the most important aspects of the deal: Either EMC or NetApp will pay far too much for Data Domain; NetApp and Data Domain are a better corporate fit; and NetApp would benefit far more from incorporating Data Domain than EMC would.

"I think NetApp's goose is almost cooked," storage analyst Dave Vellante of Wikibon told eWEEK. "It's pretty clear EMC is paranoid about NetApp getting Data Domain, so it will outbid NetApp perpetually, it seems—unless this is the ultimate poker hand to drive the price higher and then walk, which I don't think is EMC's intent."

Vellante said he's been thinking through possible "white-knight scenarios for NetApp, but I don't see it. NetApp's only hope, in my opinion, is to match EMC's offer and hope EMC bails [out of the deal] because the price it too high. I don't expect that to happen, but you never know what [Joe] Tucci's really thinking.

"All of this is insanity, in my view. Spending $2 billion-plus for a point product company with $300 million in revenue in a market that is perhaps $5 billion to $6 billion doesn't make sense, in my opinion."

Vellante said he'd rather see EMC invest in the information management space (e-mail archiving, e-discovery, records retention and others). "That's a high-value growth market with $10 billion-plus [market] potential and no clear winners. EMC currently has a subpar product offering with an outdated go-to-market strategy," he said.

Rob Stevenson of InfoPro has been talking to customers about this deal.

"For customers, the preferences are clear," Stevenson told eWEEK. "When we asked NetApp shops what acquisitions/partnerships would help them—over 300 large firms interviewed—they said NetApp and Data Domain are synergistic, and a combination of their products would simplify their operations.

"When EMC shops are asked the same question, end users mention NetApp and Compellent as top acquired preferences; Data Domain is not cited," Stevenson said.
Resource Library:

Joe Martins, storage analyst at Data Mobility Group, told eWEEK it is a no-brainer as to which offer Data Domain shareholders will accept.

"From a purely financial perspective, DD stakeholders would be fools not accept EMC's ridiculously high counter-offer," Martins said. "Without a doubt in my mind, NetApp's original offer was already based on an inflated, distorted view of Data Domain's contribution to the big picture.

"My advice to shareholders: Accept EMC's offer and laugh all the way to the bank. As for NetApp, it should walk away and be grateful EMC saved it from paying too much for too little."

Martins said that his message to NetApp is straightforward.

"Licensing dedupe is the way to go. It's important in the same way that good fuel management enables a more fuel-efficient engine, but it's just one small piece of a much larger infrastructure engine," Martins said. "Remain focused and continue to dominate in your current markets—there's plenty of growth to be found there. I suspect you may find yourself the target of an acquisition in the next two to five years."

Arguably, for the first time in its history, Data Domain will have the mandate to integrate its IP into a broad spectrum of storage products, Martins said.

"At EMC, Data Domain will have to prove its value in a hostile environment. Throw the dedupe IP into EMC's gladiator pit, and let the customers decide who survives. That's a good thing for all of us," Martins said.

Brian Babineau of Enterprise Strategy Group said he thought the "interesting dynamic is EMC's interest in Data Domain during the transaction. It appears they have gotten more serious about the deal as time progresses, whereas in the beginning it looked like they were simply going to make it more expensive for NetApp.

"We shall see if NetApp counters one more time."

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify EMC's relationship with FalconStor for its VTL.

DreamWorks Goes Extreme with Scale-Out Storage System

2009-06-17T05:39:00.002-07:00

DreamWorks Goes Extreme with Scale-Out Storage System
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Famed animation studio DreamWorks in April 2009 added Hewlett-Packard's fanciest new storage system, StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage, to its shops. The scale-out ExDS9100 system acts as an online reference library for DreamWorks' popular 3D films, and DreamWorks has big plans for the system.

Digital video quality is getting richer all the time, as are some lucky producers who hit the jackpot with movies that are box-office smashes.

As video continues to be rendered with more multiple images and as more bits per second are jammed onto disks, storage and accurate recall of all that data becomes an increasingly strategic part of the overall production picture—especially when it comes to stereoscopic 3D movies, which are having a rebirth right now.

Stereoscopic three-dimensional movies that required two analog projectors and red-and-blue glasses to view them were a fad in the 1950s that eventually petered out due to lack of standards, quality controls and other factors.
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But now 3D movies are back in digital form, and they come with a much higher quality quotient. They're also taking up much more capacity in studio data centers; studio IT administrators are well aware of the insatiable nature of the content monster.

DreamWorks is continually buying new storage. "Storage isn't a buying decision anymore," DreamWorks Senior Technologist Skottie Miller told eWEEK in 2008. "It's a way of life."

Here's a stark example of this dilemma: When DreamWorks' first "Shrek" movie debuted in May 2001, it required about 6TB of capacity in DreamWorks' data centers. Eight years later, the studio's most recent release, "Monsters vs. Aliens," requires a bit more elbow room—as in 93TB of capacity.

Both movies took more than four years to create and produce. Both have about the same running time: "Shrek" is 90 minutes, "Monsters vs. Aliens" is 94 minutes. There's simply a lot more depth of field, colors, action and special effects as the movies get increasingly sophisticated.

The bottom line: If you're going to have a quality product, you have to make a home for it. With all the new content pouring into its coffers on a 24/7 basis from its artists, DreamWorks had to figure out how to classify and store all those terabytes of video—and in an easily accessible archiving system.

DreamWorks' storage systems, located in data centers in Northern and Southern California and in Bangalore, India, use products from Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and Ibrix for different duties. Extremely powerful dual-core Intel "Woodcrest"-powered workstations have been supplied by HP for the last eight years.

In April 2009, the studio—which has a longstanding relationship with HP—added the company's newest package, the HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System. This scale-out system acts as an online reference library for "Monsters vs. Aliens" and previous films, such as "Madagascar," "Bee Movie" and "Kung Fu Panda."

"Scale-out" is a relatively recent data center industry buzzword referring to architectures for systems running thousands of servers that are required to scale nearly ad infinitum in order to comfortably handle massive workloads.

Production isn't going to be slowing down any time soon, with all the potential profits to be made. As of June 15, "Monsters vs. Aliens" had banked $195,246,609, according to industry researcher Box Office Mojo.

"Not only are we making more 3D-type movies, but we're ramping up our production schedule from four movies every two years to five movies in two years," Derek Chan, head of digital operations for DreamWorks Animation, told eWEEK.

Quantum CEO Offers His Take on EMC's Pursuit of Data Domain

2009-06-17T05:39:00.001-07:00

Veteran IT executive Rick Belluzzo tells eWEEK he believes EMC's motivation is more about keeping Data Domain out of NetApp's hands than about the acquisition of highly regarded deduplication software.

A lot of people in the data storage world are watching the skirmish between EMC and NetApp as they contest who is going to acquire deduplication specialist Data Domain.

The prevailing wisdom is that EMC and NetApp both want to acquire Data Domain for its highly regarded, midrange-market storage deduplication appliances, which are fast, cost-effective and easy to use.

But at least one key figure, Quantum CEO Rick Belluzzo, thinks there may be more to it than that.

A little background: Data Domain's board of directors accepted a revised offer of $1.9 billion in cash and stock from NetApp on June 3 and intends to stick with it. EMC, swimming in cash, has offered a cool, unsolicited $1.8 billion in straight dollars to complete the transaction.

It's also no secret that EMC would like to extend its reach into the midrange and SMB storage markets during the next few years, and Data Domain would be one way to improve that standing immediately.
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But there is a difference of opinion about what exactly EMC's motives are.

All these merger and acquisition shenanigans don't play all that well with Quantum, a longtime EMC partner that supplies both deduplication software and virtually all the tape storage that EMC sells.

Even though Data Domain has accepted the NetApp offer, there are many people in the business who will not yet write off EMC. EMC is an acquisition-oriented company accustomed to getting what it wants. The Hopkinton, Mass.-based company has taken over about 50 storage- and security-related firms in the last six years.

If EMC were to acquire Data Domain and its prized deduplication wares, that would give EMC no fewer than three different deduplication products. EMC started by buying Avamar Technologies in 2006 for $165 million, then signed a partnership with Quantum and now is trying to add Data Domain.

How many dedupe choices does one company need?

Belluzzo is quite aware of all this and is convinced that EMC's dance with Data Domain is more about keeping Data Domain out of NetApp's grasp than it is about acquiring any additional technology—no matter how good it may be.

"EMC already has a great relationship with us for enterprise dedupe, and it is working well for both companies," Belluzzo told eWEEK. "I can't see that adding Data Domain's products really will add that much value in the broader scope of their product line.

"I do think that NetApp, which is a growing company, would benefit greatly by adding Data Domain because it has products that NetApp really needs. I believe that EMC just doesn't want to see that deal happen."

Belluzzo pointed out that Quantum's deduplication software is much better suited for the high-end enterprise market because it scales further than Data Domain's.

"Our DXi [storage system line] can start at less than 1TB and go all the way up to 220TB of usable capacity with a single software architecture. Data Domain tops out at 32TB," Belluzzo said.

"Quantum also provides tight integration with tape machines, and features policy-based deduplication and replication capacities for both VTLs [virtual tape libraries] and NAS [network-attached disk storage], and it's all centrally managed."

Last week, Quantum introduced its DXi2500-D, a high-performance, deduplication appliance for remote and branch offices optimized for replication back to a central data center.

"This has about four to five times the capacity of Data Domain's appliance at about the same price," Belluzzo said.

EMC CEO, President and Chairman Joe Tucci has said publicly that he admires Data Domain for its accomplishments and that the smaller company often reminds him of EMC itself.

Tucci also has said that if EMC does acquire Data Domain, EMC will expand development of one of its flagship products that uses Quantum's software.

Another interesting bond between Quantum and EMC, Belluzzo said, is the fact that EMC recently loaned $75 million to Quantum to improve Quantum's capital structure.

If EMC can persuade Data Domain's board and stockholders to reject the NetApp deal, it will gain a stronger presence in the midrange storage market and gain a lot of loyal Data Domain customers. The midmarket, where Data Domain is a growing supplier, is by far the fastest-developing segment of the overall market.

HP, VMware Team Up on Virtualization Management

2009-06-17T05:38:00.003-07:00

HP and VMware are growing their partnership to make it easier for businesses to manage their virtualized and physical environments using a single offering. VMware is incorporating HP’s Discover and Dependency Mapping app into its upcoming vCenter ConfigControl software. In addition, HP is support VMware’s ThinApp software with its own Client Automation management software.

Hewlett-Packard and VMware are looking to make it easier for businesses to manage their virtual and physical client and server environments.

The two companies at the HP Software Universe 2009 show June 16 in Las Vegas announced that VMware in 2010 will integrate HP’s Discovery and Dependency Mapping application into its vCenter ConfigControl software.

The combination of the management software offerings will give users of VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform greater visibility into their environments and a better way to map business services in the virtual environment into their physical systems.Resource Library:

Businesses will have a single window through which to also automate such management tasks as change detection, provisioning, patching and compliance and security enforcement, according to officials with HP and VMware.

In addition, HP’s Client Automation management platform will now support VMware’s ThinApp application virtualization technology. The support means that users will have an easier time keeping track of virtualized and physical applications.

VMware ThinApp users can take advantage of the preconfigured templates in HP’s Client Automation software and use reports generated by the HP offering to track virtual and physical applications for enhanced asset management.

The two companies also will develop joint go-to-market and sales programs.

Businesses will get multiple benefits from the HP-VMware collaboration, according to Ramin Sayar, vice president of products, software and solutions at HP.

"Customers are looking for a dramatically better approach to IT management in order to reduce costs and risks, while achieving integrated seamless management of the physical and virtual datacenter," Sayar said in a statement. "The combination of HP software and VMware solutions will provide customers with an end-to-end automated solution for building and managing next-generation datacenters."

Dell Expands Enterprise Technology Portfolio

2009-06-17T05:38:00.001-07:00

Dell focuses on virtualization and high-performance computing for its next round of updates to its lines, which include new PowerEdge servers and the EqualLogic PS4000 storage array, as well as new consulting services. The new Dell products have been tailored to focus on the needs of both enterprise and SMBs.

Dell announced a variety of business-centric products and services on June 17, primarily servers and consulting offerings designed to make the creation of data centers, and the implementation of virtualization, a more efficient task for the enterprise and SMBs alike.

The company’s small-to-midsize-business offerings include the EqualLogic PS4000 storage array and the PowerVault NX3000 NAS (network-attached storage) device. The former is designed to offer enterprise-class storage virtualization, thin provisioning and management capabilities, while the latter reduces duplicate files with SIS (Single-Instant Storage) technology while sharing files across Windows and non-Windows clients. The NX3000 can also double as an optional iSCSI target in the support of application data.

Dell is also introducing the PowerEdge T410 and T710 tower servers, which are aimed specifically at both SMBs wrestling with small amounts of space and businesses across the size range looking to boost their productivity.Resource Library:

For more specs and photos of Dell's newest servers, click here.

At 24 inches deep, the short chassis of the PowerEdge T410 is designed to compact itself into tight spaces and shallow racks. Both the T410 and the T710 feature one-button deployment via the Lifecycle Controller, and the T710 can include up to 16 drives for large local storage capacity.

On the high-performance computing end, Dell is also introducing the PowerEdge R410, designed for intensive high-performance computing workloads. The company claims these new servers have a 73 percent performance improvement over the last generation, while also saving power. The device includes the DMC (Dell Management Console) and Dell Lifecycle Controller for simplified management.

In addition, Dell is pairing its new hardware lines with a variety of consulting and other services designed to streamline implementation into both SMBs and the enterprise. The Dell ProConsult offerings include five consulting options designed to optimize the data center, each focusing on a specific area: Platform Optimization & Virtualization, Data Center Planning & Management, Disaster Recovery, Data Management, and Facilities Efficiency.

Dell is also offering two “business-ready” virtualization configurations to introduce a virtual enterprise infrastructure into a business. These two infrastructures include Data Center Virtualization Configuration, which combines Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS600 iSCSI storage technology, Cisco Catalyst networking switches, VMware vSphere 4 and Platspin Migrate from Novell; and Small and Medium Business Virtualization Configuration, which combines a variety of hardware, including the PowerEdge R710 and the Dell PowerVault MD3000i, with Microsoft’s virtualization suite.

Other additions to Dell’s virtual solutions line include enhanced hypervisors, with support for VMware vSphere 4, Windows Server 2208 R2 Hyper-V and Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5.0; enhanced disaster recovery with reduced application downtime and managed data protection; and application virtualization. The Dell ProManage Virtual Server Remote Monitoring and Reporting allows IT administrators improved visibility into VM performance, to determine the average utilization of everything from processor to disk at the VM level and to, ultimately, save time.

RingCube Takes On VMware, Citrix in Desktop Virtualization

2009-06-12T12:21:00.002-07:00

RingCube is unveiling vDesk 2.0, the latest version of its desktop virtualization product. A key new offering within vDesk 2.0 is the Workspace Virtualization Engine, which is designed to make it easier for enterprises to manage, deploy and secure their desktop virtualization environments. It also is a key differentiator for RingCube in a competitive space that includes VMware and Citrix, RingCube officials say.

RingCube Technologies is rolling out the next generation of its vDesk desktop virtualization technology, including a new feature designed to improve the manageability and security around the offering.

RingCube’s vDesk 2.0, announced May 1, includes the company’s WVE (Workspace Virtualization Engine), which company officials say is a key differentiator in a highly competitive field that includes such companies as VMware and Citrix Systems.

It also comes the same week that Quest Software, at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, announced it was integrating its Quest vWorkspace virtual desktop management offering with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Microsoft App-V (Application Virtualization) technology.

Doug Dooley, vice president of product management at RingCube, said the company is looking to separate itself from other vendors in the desktop virtualization space by coming out with solutions that don’t require a lot of upfront costs or require a lot of duplicate Windows licenses.

VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) solutions require high upfront costs—sometimes in the millions of dollars—and they bring with them more storage and power and cooling expenses, Dooley said. By comparison, a vDesk solution for 2,500 users runs around $500,000, he said.Resource Library:

In addition, mobility is an issue with VDI, Dooley said.

An eWEEK Labs analyst says there's no need to rush into VDI.

RingCube’s vDesk offering is designed to enable enterprise users to put the technology on their work PCs or on unmanaged systems, such as their home computers. When they turn on vDesk, it gives them a personalized virtual workspace, complete with their own settings, files, applications and desktop, Dooley said. The company’s MobileSync technology then lets users synchronize their vDesk workspace between PCs, USB drives or other portable media, a network file share or VDI environments.

RingCube’s WVE in vDesk 2.0 offers what Dooley called a lightweight virtual desktop, with an isolated network stack and support for such applications as endpoint security, databases and PC management software, which require drivers and security services.

Among the components of WVE are vDeskNet, which enables virtual networking by separating and isolating network traffic from the host PC, and virtual user management, which gives the virtual workspace a unique set of user accounts separate from the host PC.

The Virtual Security Store offers a separate storage area within the virtual workspace for such items as certificates, and Virtual Windows Services offer improve application isolation from the host machine.

Other security and isolation controls in vDesk 2.0 come through virtual workspace encryption though integration with third-party software, as well as a virtual networking stack that isolates all network traffic inside the virtual workspace from the host system.

The goal is to give users an easier and more secure way to run a virtual desktop environment, Dooley said.

“This thing is not the hardest thing to get your arms around as far as deployment is concerned,” he said.

The vDesk solution also offers improved management enabling enterprises to create single workspace, then give employees their own version of that master copy. There is also a more streamlined log-in process.

Dooley said businesses are beginning to take a hard look at desktop virtualization solutions, driving in large part by the need to reduce operating and capital costs and to improve business continuity.

“It’s so early in the [desktop virtualization space],” he said. “We are where we were with server virtualization five years ago.”

Dooley said he expects interest in desktop virtualization to grow, and sees Microsoft’s upcoming introduction of Windows 7 as a driver to get enterprises thinking more about their desktop environments.

“I don’t think people are going to stay on the status quo forever,” he said.

RingCube’s vDesk 2.0 is available immediately, staring at $200 per user. RingCube also will be showcasing the new offering at the Citrix Synergy show May 5-6 in Las Vegas.

Hyperformix Eases Virtualization Capacity Planning

2009-06-12T12:21:00.001-07:00

Hyperformix is expanding the capabilities of its Capacity Manager and Data Manager software products to better support virtualized environments. The software offerings are designed to help IT administrators map out the performance and capacity needs of their virtualization initiatives, and also can enable them to better figure out such business problems as server consolidation and application upgrades. The software supports a wide range of virtualization technologies from such vendors as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Sun, HP and IBM.

Hyperformix wants to make it easier for businesses to plan out their virtual environments.

Hyperformix is making enhancements to its Capacity Manager and Data Manager offerings that are designed to not only enable enterprises to more effectively map out the performance and capacity needs of their virtualization initiatives, but also to budget for the IT support that will be needed, find ways to reduce costs and extend the value of their current infrastructure.

“Our customers look to us to help them accurately plan and communicate what it will take to support business services in IT, and where cost-saving opportunities exist,” Bruce Milne, vice president of products and marketing for Hyperformix, said in a statement.Resource Library:

Capacity Manager 4.0 and Data Manager 3.1, announced May 5, can automatically identify underutilized virtual machines and systems that can be safely consolidated, according to Hyperformix officials.

The software also offers automated dashboards and reporting capabilities that enable IT administrators to more easily convey complex data to business users and identify cost-saving opportunities through the collection of data on such areas as hardware costs and power consumption.

In addition, the software products support virtualization technology from such vendors as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, as well as modeling hardware, operating systems and other components.

Hyperformix also offers solutions kits designed to help IT administrators and business users figure out such issues as server consolidation and application upgrades.

HyTrust Looks to Build Community Around Virtualization

2009-06-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

HyTrust, which launched as a company in early April with the Enterprise Edition of its namesake virtualization management appliance, is rolling out a free Community Edition aimed at SMBs. At the same time, HyTrust also is making a push to create a community around its technology to enable information sharing among users and to speed up its own product development. HyTrust’s technology currently manages VMware environments, though support of Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V is on the way.

A month after launching the company with a policy-based management appliance for virtualized environments, officials at HyTrust are now looking to build a community among its customers.

HyTrust May 5 announced that it is releasing a free community edition of its namesake appliance, aimed at giving SMBs a cost-effective way to get into virtualization and cloud computing. The HyTrust Appliance Community Edition, which is designed to give users a central control point for managing and monitoring virtualized environments, also is a tool that enterprises can use to get started, according to HyTrust officials.

The free community version offers the same functionality and features as HyTrust’s Enterprise Edition, but with limitations. For example, users can only have three protected hypervisor hosts.Resource Library:

At the same time, HyTrust is kicking off an online community designed to support its vision of a more easily managed virtualized environment, to create a repository that enables users to share information and give feedback to the company, and to help HyTrust direct its R&D efforts.

The Community Edition lets larger enterprises easily evaluate the capabilities of HyTrust’s technology, and give feedback on their findings. In turn, HyTrust will be able to speed up product development and innovations, officials said.

“The potential for the HyTrust Community is unbounded,” HyTrust CEO Eric Chiu said in a statement. “We see this not only as a terrific opportunity for HyTrust to meet currently unmet needs of the market, but also as a great way for HyTrust to harness the powers of distributed peer review.”

The Community Edition is available to members of the HyTrust Community. To join, click here.

HyTrust launched the company April 7 with the Enterprise Edition, which can be bought as a 1U appliance or as software that can run on the customer’s hardware.

HyTrust currently can manage VMware environments, though it will expand its reach to the Xen hypervisor from Citrix Systems later in the year, he said. The company also is working on products to support infrastructures using Microsoft's Hyper-V technology.

Vizioncore Creates Self-Service Virtualization

2009-06-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

Vizioncore’s vControl offers a Web interface and customizable templates that let users build and deploy virtualization machines, freeing up IT administrators from such tasks and giving them more time to manage the VMs. The product also supports multiple virtualization platforms, including those from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and Sun.

Vizioncore is looking to bring self-service capabilities to virtualization.

Vizioncore’s new vControl management tool, announced May 5, is designed to let end users provision virtual machines themselves, offloading such tasks from IT administrators.

With end users doing the provisioning and deploying of the virtual machines, IT administrators are free to manage the VMs through a single interface provided by Vizioncore.Resource Library:

The product features a Web interface and customizable templates for end users to build and deploy virtual machines for themselves. Another interface lets administrators control multiple virtualization platforms, including VMware ESX and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Systems’ XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Zones.

vControl also offers out-of-the-box workflows, a visual workflow editor to build new workflows, a Web services interface and an SDK (software development kit) for integration with third-party systems, all aimed at driving down administrative costs.

IT administrators can also bring high availability to unlimited numbers of virtual machines, further driving down operational costs.

vControl is available immediately, starting at $399 per socket.

Oracle's Virtual Iron Buyout Will Provide Essential VM Tool Set

2009-06-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

Oracle's Virtual Iron Buyout Will Provide Essential VM Tool Set

Oracle has a number of reasons to want to own a mature virtualization tool set, and acquiring Virtual Iron contributes to that goal. To become the full-service IT infrastructure company it envisions, Oracle needs more control of virtualized software and hardware for all its deployments. Oracle doesn't want to keep paying a so-called virtualization tax to third-party providers such as VMware.

Oracle, a company with its own permanent mergers and acquisitions office, is adding an important ingredient to its product catalog in a quest to become the newest all-purpose IT systems company: a new-generation tool box that will administer both Windows and Linux virtualization deployments.

When it closes a deal to acquire Virtual Iron announced May 13, Oracle will join EMC (owner of VMware), Microsoft (Hyper-V), Citrix Systems (XenServer) and Sun Microsystems (Sun Containers, xVM Ops Center and VirtualBox software) as one of the only IT systems providers that own server virtualization products.
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After the summer of 2009, that number of companies will shrink by one, because Sun also will have become property of Oracle in the widely reported $7.4 billion acquisition deal announced April 20.

VMware products are installed on about 85 percent of all enterprise IT systems, with the others all claiming much smaller pieces of the virtualization pie.

Oracle has a number of reasons to want to own a mature virtualization tool set.

First, to become the full-service IT infrastructure company it envisions, it needs more control of virtualized software and hardware for all its deployments. Oracle doesn't want to keep paying a "virtualization tax" to third-party providers like VMware or any other company.

Secondly, Oracle needs a more complete set of tools for its home-developed Xen-based hypervisor, Oracle VM. It's not an accident that Virtual Iron's platform also is Xen-based, built on open-source code. Oracle's virtual machine controls currently do not have management features as good as Virtual Iron's LivePower, which offers much greater control of server power consumption. So the acquisition also is a green IT move for Oracle.

Oracle intends to bundle Virtual Iron's tools with its own VM layer to give users a full-stack management console for both virtual and physical systems. Virtual Iron also features better capacity utilization and virtual server configuration tools than Oracle offers today.

Oracle's Virtual Iron Buyout Will Provide Essential VM Tool Set - Few Independent Virtualization Companies Survive
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With Virtual Iron leaving the ranks of providers of independent virtualization options, only a small number of them remain in the market, including Parallels, Debian's OpenVZ and Ubuntu Linux.

"Market consolidation seems to be upon us," Galen Schreck, an analyst with Forrester Research, told eWEEK. "Plus, Citrix's move to give away a full-featured version of XenServer makes it pretty hard to charge for this kind of functionality.

"What's a company like Virtual Iron to do? Both are Xen-based, and have pretty similar capabilities. Sure, Citrix charges extra for its most advanced management, but you get a lot of functionality for no money whatsoever. Meanwhile, VMware is the clear market leader with Microsoft being the next most popular platform in a distant second place."
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Virtual Iron aimed its wares mostly at the small and midsize business markets. Is Oracle making a play for the smaller markets with this acquisition?

"I don't think this acquisition is about smaller markets—it's more of an upgrade to the management capabilities of Oracle's own Xen-based hypervisor," Schreck said. "They get a better UI [user interface] as well as dynamic workload management and power management."

Schreck said it is still unclear how Oracle will handle the integration of both Sun and Virtual Iron into its catalog.

"There is definitely some overlap here," Schreck said. "Neither product has a lot of customers, so it's not a question of which has more market traction. Sun's xVM Ops Center is a nice product, but Virtual Iron is more Windows-friendly—which gives Oracle immediate access to the largest virtualization market."

'Interesting dynamic' with VMware

The Virtual Iron acquisition creates an interesting competitive dynamic with VMware, Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group told eWEEK.

"They're not the best of partners, but they do some work together," Kerravala said. "As for Sun, it [Virtual Iron] is a parallel offering. Oracle didn't have any way to virtualize Windows or Linux environments."

Katherine Egbert, an analyst with Jefferies & Co., said she believes the acquisition is a clear sign that Oracle wants to move deeper into the midmarket, a place it has hardly penetrated in the past.

"It is a midmarket play. Virtual Iron has lot of government and education [customers] in their installed base," Egbert said. "Oracle gets the full stack now, everything from the bare-metal hypervisor up to the highest-level user application."

Windows 7's XP Mode Will Be a Desktop Virtualization Boost

2009-06-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

Windows 7's XP Mode combines the company's desktop and presentation virtualization technologies to serve up applications that won't run properly on Windows 7 from a virtual XP SP3 instance. By tapping desktop-based virtualization as a bridge for Windows software compatibility gaps, organizations could achieve a smooth transition from Windows to a competing platform.

Last month, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will include an XP Mode, which combines the company's desktop and presentation virtualization technologies to serve up applications that won't run properly on Windows 7 from a virtual XP SP3 instance.

When I heard about XP Mode, I was immediately struck by the marketing benefits that the feature can provide for non-Windows platforms. That's because tapping desktop-based virtualization as a bridge for Windows software compatibility gaps is one of the keys to achieving a smooth transition from Windows to a competing platform.

When someone asks me about moving away from Windows to Linux or the Mac, I tell them that they'll most likely find native Mac or Linux replacements for their Windows applications, but that it may be necessary to run a copy of Windows in a virtual machine for certain applications.

I keep a Windows VM on my Linux notebook for things like product testing and attending GoToMeeting conferences. (Microsoft's own Live Meeting is, by comparison, very Linux-friendly.) The Windows VM approach to platform-switching can work pretty well, but this tactic does have various wrinkles.Resource Library:

First, you need a licensed copy of Windows and enough RAM to devote to the Windows guest without starving your host OS. Also, you'll need the same sort of security software and patching policies you would apply to a regular Windows instance. Finally, depending on the type of application you're dealing with, performance might be an issue, and applications that require direct access to hardware resources might not work at all.

Now that Microsoft is pushing virtualization as a crutch for migrating from XP to Windows 7, it may occur to many that upgrading from XP to 7 wouldn't prove significantly more painful than moving from XP to OS X or Linux—particularly since XP Mode on Windows 7 shares most of the same wrinkles that mar XP on Linux or Mac setups.

More importantly, though, XP Mode will introduce the idea and the practice of running multiple, reasonably isolated OS instances on a single machine to a broader pool of users. As more people embrace the practice, I expect to see Microsoft and other vendors work out more of its kinks and, eventually, offer new classes of products aimed specifically at enabling these Russian doll desktop scenarios.

Despite the possibly beneficial side effects of XP Mode for alternative platforms, I believe that Microsoft and Windows are best-positioned to take advantage of the rise of the virtual desktop machines.

As eWEEK Labs has discussed recently, the lines between personal and company devices and computing environments are now more blurry than ever. As I see it, the best way to provide both individual users and large organizations with the control they require to satisfy their needs is to provide multiple virtualized environments on a single piece of hardware.

Given its advantages around available applications, integrated identity and desktop management capabilities, and mind and market share among businesses, Windows seems to be the clear option for delivering the managed corporate desktop element of these mixed environments.

XP Mode could be a first step toward colonizing the virtual desktop territories, but for something like this to really take off, Microsoft will have to begin approaching VMs as a first-class "hardware" platform and look toward stripping out bits that aren't required in these environments. Also, we'll have to see more advances in bare-metal desktop and notebook hypervisor technologies, like those demonstrated by Citrix in the form of its Project Independence.

Maybe desktop platform diversity and Microsoft monoculture can live side by side, after all. If nothing else, Microsoft would probably be less touchy about mounting "I'm a Mac" choruses if managed Windows instances lurked beneath more of Apple's matte aluminum covers.