Novell announced it has completed its acquisition of PlateSpin. PlateSpin allows the movement of workloads between physical and virtual environments regardless of platform or operating system. These capabilities, combined with Novell's systems management solutions, enable customers to fully leverage their virtualization investments and reduce both costs and server sprawl in their data centers.

Citrix has put out XenServer 4.1, the first rev of the open source virtualization software since it bought XenSource late last year. Along with the dot release Citrix has simplified its pricing model to let customers deploy an unlimited number of virtual machines or guest operating systems for $600 per server a year or $900 per server perpetually, adding to the virtualization price war against VMware that Microsoft started.

Morph Labs announced the availability of a virtual application infrastructure subscription. The service will allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and entrepreneurs to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications while reducing upfront investment costs and speeding time to market.

Celceo unveiled the latest generation of its application virtualization technology for individuals and small businesses. With this latest release, Celceo allows virtual applications to integrate with Windows, creating a seamless and transparent experience for end users.

FalconStor announced that the FalconStor Network Storage Server, powered by the FalconStor IPStor platform, has been deployed by Safeguard Properties, the largest privately held field services company in the U.S., for storage reliability and data recovery. The resulting solution is allowing Safeguard to meet their demanding recovery point and time objectives, and has garnered a position as a finalist for Safeguard in Computerworld's Storage Networking World 2008 Best Practices Awards Program. The integration was performed by FalconStor partner Chi Corporation to enable Safeguard to meet its storage documentation requirements that have increased by approximately 500 percent over the past two years.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Virtualization Software & Services to their offering. This report analyzes key trends that define the virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific. This study aims to understand key market dynamics, drivers and inhibitors in the context of IT challenges and pain points facing business organizations across the region.

Endeavors Technologies and Tadpole Technology announced the availability of Application Jukebox Enterprise Edition and Application Jukebox SaaS Edition. Application Jukebox is the next-generation application virtualization and streaming solution that provides a highly flexible and secure platform for on-demand application delivery.

Virtual announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the Northeast 100 Top Private Companies. The first-annual Northeast 100 list was compiled by the AlwaysOn editorial panel. In order to be eligible for the list, companies in the Northeastern United States had to be creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets, demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in a key sector.

Enigmatec Corporation and Scalent Systems announced an integration partnership to enable policy driven automation of server repurposing in the data center. This partnership combines policy-based IT process automation from Enigmatec and server repurposing from Scalent to deliver an integrated software solution to place compute resources where and when they are needed in the data center. This implementation of real-time infrastructure, lowers data center management operations costs while increasing flexibility in the face of business need change.

DataCore Software announced that The State Group has selected, deployed and seen results with its SANmelody storage virtualization software solution. DataCore partner Interware Systems was responsible for the sale and the deployment at The State Group. The State Group needed to implement a solution to resolve their data back-up challenges and therefore decided to purchase SANmelody. In so doing, The State Group was introduced to DataCore's storage virtualization capabilities. It was then a natural progression, after realizing the productivity and flexibility benefits of virtualizing their storage, to virtualize their servers as well. Currently, SANmelody supports the company's existing systems, its remote, Citrix application servers as well as their new deployment of VMware servers. SANmelody did more than enable back-ups for The State Group; it became the first step to going down the path of Total Enterprise Virtualization.

Server technology has come a long way from the single-box, single disk configuration it once was, having evolved solutions such as SAN (Storage Area Networks) and virtualization to make more efficient use of resources for greater power to deliver data and services. Chip technology such as quad-core has come about to keep pace with the constantly rising need for processing power in such environments. But despite all these advances, the cornerstone to server response remains the hard drives, as they remain the slowest components -- the 'weakest links.'

Commercial Data Systems (CDS) has introduced a new Server and Storage Virtualization practice to its portfolio of Technology Solutions. CDS' latest offering employs an innovative, end-to-end approach to virtualization that eliminates the risks and costs associated with traditional 'point in time' and 'silo' methodologies. Developed in conjunction with NetApp, CDS Server and Storage Virtualization, leverages the company's extensive expertise in architecting and deploying highly available storage solutions for mission-critical environments.

SANRAD launched a new generation of V-Switch Intelligent Network Switches, the V-Switch 3440 and the V-Switch 3840. Designed to enable the cost-effective management of virtual storage infrastructures, the V-Switch solutions feature an open, heterogeneous storage networking architecture with enhanced connectivity and integrated storage virtualization and disaster recovery to complement virtual server environments.

Xiotech Corporation announced that VMPowered joined Xiotech's new channel program as a VMware Value Added Consultant Referral partner, effective March 1, 2008. VMPowered is focused on helping companies move to a virtual IT environment, through virtual server and storage design, implementation and post-sales support. The company is a designated VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) and VMware VIP Enterprise Partner. VMPowered works with end user customers directly and in partnership with storage vendors such as Xiotech.

The late nineties saw most global businesses make a transition towards a paperless office. Today, the buzzword amongst major businesses is 'Virtualization.' Employees connected to each other can share data and make business decisions on a real time basis. In the quest for virtualization, organizations are facing roadblocks during implementation in terms of Information security. Any compromise on the security aspect will leave the network vulnerable to attacks from a range of sources. Such connectivity if not secured will provide attackers the perfect medium to approach employees from the relative anonymity of the Internet.

Virtualization is an abstract term. Many people have heard about it, but how many know what virtualization is all about? In fact, virtualization has been around since the 1950s in the sense of time sharing on mainframe computers. However, virtualization has become a new concept that has sprung from its 1950s beginning. Virtualization allows companies to get more done in less time with quality and efficiency. It gives companies competitive advantages and helps keep things separate and simple. There are many different layers/ types of virtualization - but how do you know virtualization is right for your business? In this SYS-CON.TV Virtualization Power Panel, representatives from DataSynapse, Mindbridge, Ring Cube and SWsoft give their insights.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Ben Rudolph, popular Virtualization Conference 2007 West speaker and Communications Director of Parallels, enjoyed his April Fool's Day revenge yesterday on the Belgian website that had earlier in the day ran a spoof item suggesting that Sun had snapped up Parallels for $205M.

LiveAmmo Corporation's new partnership program gives technical training companies and computer learning centers the chance to profit from the multiple uses of VMware virtualization technology. The LiveAmmo Authorized Training Center (LATC) program allows partners to capitalize on the enterprise education market by offering LiveAmmo's VMware training classes to Fortune 500 companies, large banks and financial institutions, health providers and hospitals, and federal, state, and local government agencies, with guaranteed sales franchise rights in an exclusive 35-mile radius surrounding each partner classroom location.

While data center automation already plays a significant role in IT organizations' efforts to link services with business priorities and objectives, the role of automation will become more significant over the next one to two years. This is the key finding of a recent independent study sponsored by CA. This study surveyed 300 CIOs and other top IT executives at companies in the US, EMEA and APAC with more than $250 million in annual revenue. It found the top three goals companies are hoping to achieve with data center automation efforts are uptime/business continuity, performance management, and enabling dynamic response to changes in business demands.

Transitive announced that its strategic business partner Intel decided to use Transitive's QuickTransit software to demonstrate its next-generation 'Tukwila' microprocessor. During its public preview of the quad-core processor, Intel demonstrated a prototype system with Transitive's QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linu x/Itanium, running sample enterprise workloads that were translated 'on the fly' by QuickTransit. The new processor will become the flagship of Intel's Itanium range, with double the performance of the current dual-core Itanium 9100 series CPUs. The 'Tukwila' processor also features 30M of on-die cache, dual memory controllers and mainframe-class RAS capabilities.

Service providers that use Parallels Automation software can now easily deliver real-time spam and virus filtering, attack blocking, and e-mail traffic monitoring using a Google Apps security and compliance package. Parallels Automation is integrated with the Google Message Filtering e-mail offering, so service providers can streamline delivery of hosted services to their customers and provide automated billing and provisioning of the Google services through Parallels.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

AMD Thursday announced its anticipated never-bef ore-seen-on-an-x86-chip triple-core processor hoping it removes some of the tarnish of its Barcelona debacle. The chip and its friends are out a bit earlier than thought, given the erratum mess. It's labeled the thing the Phenom X3 8000 series and is pushing it out to enthusiasts who crave high-powered desktops for games and digital media. The three-headed chip is supposed to improve the performance of multithreaded applications over dual-core processors of the same clock speed by possibly 30%.

Sun has lost David Yen, the head of its chips unit, Sun Microelectronics, who's going to Juniper Networks as EVP, emerging technologies where he?s supposed to gather a team to develop widgetry for 'the intersection of HPC and networking.' According to an SEC filing, he quit last Friday after 20 years and assorted jobs at Sun. He's only been running the Sparc operation for a year. He was supposedly unhappy running storage, his previous job, and thinking about leaving Sun then so he was repotted.

As luck would have it The Inquirer stumbled upon Raymond James financial analyst Hans Mosesmann's recent note on AMD, which isn't pretty. Not pretty at all. He thinks that AMD is going to spin off manufacturing, finally explaining what its secret 'we-won't-tell-you -what-it-is' asset light really is. Even to the point of spitting in Intel?s eye and daring it to sue because the dusty old agreement that lets AMD make x86 chips at all says it can't subcontract more than 20% of its production.

HP's nose is out of joint because Dell has stolen a march on it by OEMing Egenera's PAN data center virtualization and management software. HP's first reaction to the news, which it apparently knew was coming, was to say, 'Oh, we can do that. We can virtualize the data center.'

Virtual Cloud Computing represents the next wave of virtualization and offers significant market opportunities by providing a new, simpler, and much more pervasive platform for on-demand, desktop and application service delivery. While server-side virtualization helps enterprises optimize data center resources, the use of a universal dialtone technology offers a significantly larger market for desktop users in both commercial and consumer segments. The key to virtual cloud computing is in the universal dialtone which securely links users to desktop applications and content resources, on demand, via any device.

Xsigo announced that Georgia Tech's College of Computing has deployed Xsigo's I/O virtualization technology into a research environment at the Center of Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) in Atlanta, Georgia. Xsigo's VP 780 I/O Director has been implemented into CERCS latest computing research project on virtual server performance management which will study the impact of virtual machines running on multiple platforms.

ScaleMP announced the expansion of its product line based on the Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture, which aggregates multiple industry-standard x86 servers into one high-end system. By using virtualization to create high-end symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computers from off-the-shelf x86 systems, the ScaleMP solution increases scalability and performance. The ScaleMP product line includes two products: a standalone solution, which enables the four-socket system, and an embedded solution that helps original design manufacturers (ODMs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) build high-end systems.

Western Blue announced its Authorized Consultant and Enterprise Level Partnership with VMware. As an Authorized Consultant and Enterprise partner, Western Blue is able to help customers design, plan and deploy both traditional computing infrastructures and virtual infrastructures for customers seeking VMware solutions.

VKernel announced a partnership with the Virtualization Consolidation Academy of Prosper Intelligence, a value added distributor specializing in virtualization and consolidation of business critical applications, servers and data storage pools. Under the agreement, Prosper Intelligence will distribute VKernel's Suite of Virtual Appliances for managing VMware ESX environments to its network of partners and solution providers throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

Citrix announced the availability of Citrix XenServer 4.1. With the new release, Citrix also unveiled a new pricing model that allows customers to deploy an unlimited number of virtual machines per server at a single low price. The new pricing applies to all editions of XenServer, including the XenServer Platinum Edition that brings the benefits of the dynamic datacenter to both physical and virtual servers. These enhancements, together with an expanding list of resellers and strategic infrastructure partners are making virtualization easier and more affordable for customers of all sizes.

VrtualLogix announced the availability of VLX Developer v2.0, offering enhanced support for deploying VLX realtime virtualization technology to performance-critical, Intel-based systems. Developer v2.0 complements VLX for Network Infrastructure v3.0, also announced, by enabling architects to create and deploy virtual platforms. These VLX-based systems offer the traditional cost-savings benefits of virtualization, combined with deterministic support for real-time operating systems (RTOS) as well as their device drivers and application code.

VirtualLogix announced VLX for Network Infrastructure supporting Intel Core Microarchitecture, version 3.0. VirtualLogix's new release blends the rich Microsoft Windows operating system environment with the existing capabilities of real-time operating systems (RTOS) or Linux by applying real-time virtualization technology on platforms using multicore processors.

VirtualLogix announced that it has joined The Multicore Association, a global non-profit consortium focused on developing standards that help speed time to market for products that involve multicore implementations. As a member of the consortium, VirtualLogix joins organizations such as National Instruments, Nokia Siemens Networks, Intel, Freescale Semiconductor and Texas Instruments (TI), to help drive virtualization standards for multicore processors.

Acronis announced its partnership with FedTek, a reseller and systems integrator to IT customers in federal and civil agencies. IT buyers looking for backup and recovery software will have access to the Acronis True Image family of disaster recovery and virtualization migration products, which will be available on the FedTek's General Services Administration's (GSA) schedule and other contracts.

To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.

Veeam Software and Infotronics announced they have formed a partnership to better serve the Australasian virtualization market. Infotronics will now make Veeam products available as part of its portfolio.

VMware demonstrated the future of desktop computing. Across the globe customers who have standardized on VMware for server virtualization are now poised to bring the benefits of virtualization to the desktop. By extending the VMware platform to the desktop, IT administrators can deploy virtual machines on every PC and deliver a complete desktop experience that is easy to manage, fast to deploy, less costly to maintain, always-current and more secure.