Dell will take a big giant step out ahead of HP and IBM in the virtualization sweepstakes when it announces that it is OEMing PAN, Egenera's data center virtualization and management software. Egenera, which has been doing virtualization way longer than most people, claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls 'Virtualization 2.0,' the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing.

Virtualization is quickly becoming a staple technology for enterprise IT. The theme of this November's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo is 'The Next Generation of Virtualization.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft's place in the data center. Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box.

Dell builds appliances that it sells to OEMs like Google's search box. Its latest effort is the OEM CR100 server, a simple, stripped-down, entry-level platform, built with PowerEdge R200 technology. The short-depth 1U is good for a two-year lifecycle.

SunGard announced a partnership with VMware. This strategic partnership will help organizations leverage VMware's proven virtualization platform with open access to SunGard's vast infrastructure, providing secondary data center facilities. Ensuring availability and recoverability of applications, systems and technology in the face of disruptions is a requirement for today's organizations. While 24-48-hour recovery windows were commonplace five years ago, many business leaders now require IT to recover systems in less than eight hours, with even more aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) coming soon.

DataCore announced that JMR Construction has become a DataCore SANmelody customer courtesy of DataCore partner Integral Networks. VMware and DataCore serve as a way forward for the DataCore partner and customer alike. The combination provides a cost effective alternative that made it practical for JMR to save by not having to invest in additional, physical servers.

Emulex announced that EMC has qualified the Emulex LightPulse LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for the EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage system families. Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs, which are available from EMC through EMC Select, provide customers with new performance, advanced virtualization and security features, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel products.

3PAR announced that a recently released report by the Taneja Group defines and analyzes a new category of next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems from vendors including 3PAR. The report forecasts revenue growth for next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems for the period between 2007 and 2011 and identifies shifts in the Fibre Channel storage market that Taneja believes are largely responsible for driving revenue growth for this new segment.

Dell announced its broadest lineup of dedicated virtualization solutions ever. More than a dozen new servers, tools, and services simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in Enterprises of any size.

3PAR is a provider of utility storage, a category of highly-virtualized, tightly-clustered, and dynamically-tiered storage arrays built for utility computing. Organizations use utility computing to build cost-effective virtualized IT infrastructures for flexible workload consolidation. 3PAR Utility Storage gives customers an alternative to traditional arrays by delivering resilient infrastructure with increased agility at a lower total cost to meet their changing business needs. As a pioneer of thin provisioning - a green technology developed to address storage underutilization and inefficiencies - 3PAR offers products designed to minimize power consumption and promote environmental responsibility. With 3PAR, customers have reduced the costs of allocated storage capacity, administration, and SAN infrastructure while increasing adaptability and resiliency. 3PAR Utility Storage is built to meet the demands of open systems consolidation, integrated data lifecycle management, and performance-intensive applications.

Motorola through Motorola Ventures, its strategic venture capital arm, announced it made an equity investment in VirtualLogix, a maker of virtualization software for communications devices and infrastructure equipment. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. VirtualLogix specializes in real-time virtualization - an innovative technology that is shaping the future for communications devices and equipment. Their technology enables the mobility of applications from the desktop to devices, improves quality of service and security in an open mobile world, and will enable a new generation of dynamic individual user experiences.

Neocleus announced that it has completed more than 18 months of work to enhance the Xen hypervisor to work on endpoints such as desktops and laptops. Neocleus will contribute these enhancements to the open source community to accelerate the adoption and development of a new generation of enterprise endpoint solutions. To create the hypervisor, Neocleus enhanced the Xen Open Source server-oriented hypervisor and transformed it into an endpoint-oriented hypervisor.

Neocleus announced the culmination of 18 months of innovation and research by unveiling its strategy and approach for addressing the security, performance and IT manageability requirements of enterprise endpoints across a distributed network. The Neocleus strategy provides businesses with a new paradigm for endpoints such as desktops and laptops that changes the way business is conducted and resources are secured, to allow IT departments to maintain unprecedented control of their distributed IT assets and to give end users the complete flexibility they need to do their work.

ClearCube announced that its software business is being spun-off and launched as an independent new company called VDIworks. Built on five generations of proven success within enterprise production environments, VDIworks delivers comprehensive, flexible software management platforms for creating, deploying and managing virtual desktop infrastructure. ClearCube, on the other hand, will continue to provide its complete solutions for centralized desktop computing, including end-to-end desktop virtualization. As independent companies, both ClearCube and VDIworks will maximize their business potential and gain the flexibility to meet the rapidly growing demands of their respective target markets.

MonoSphere announced Storage Horizon 3.7 with a range of analytical capabilities, which reduce the complexity and time required to manage today's heterogeneous storage environments. Storage Horizon 3.7 includes enhanced support for VMware environments, a new automated chargeback capability, advanced analytics, advanced analysis of storage consumed by databases, and adds support for EMC Celerra and IBM DS and ESS arrays.

Virtutech announced that General Dynamics C4 Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics, is deploying Virtutech Simics for the ground segment of the U.S. Navy's Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) program. The ground system will be provided by Lockheed Martin, prime contractor for the MUOS program.

VirtualLogix introduced VLX vHA, a solution that enables high-availability (HA) assurances for communications equipment utilizing virtualization. Tightly integrated with its real-time virtualization solution for network equipment, VLX for Network Infrastructure, VLX vHA increases system availability without the cost and scalability restrictions of traditional solutions. VLX vHA also meets the needs of high-end systems with demanding availability requirements that want to overcome the design challenges presented by new multicore processor-based systems.

Ericom announced the availability of Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect for Oracle VM, a desktop virtualization (VDI) solution based on Oracle's server virtualization software. Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect for Oracle VM harnesses the power of the companies' respective virtualization products to deliver secure, on-demand, and centrally managed access to virtual desktops and applications.

DataCore announced that it has accepted a $30 million equity investment from Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners. Insight Venture Partners is a private equity and venture capital firm focused on the global software and Internet industries. Updata Partners is an information technology-focused venture capital firm whose general partners have been active as investors and operators in the IT industry for more than two decades.

Dell is talking with Tecom Investments, an investment arm of the Dubai government, about a joint venture that could raise Dell's sales profile in the Middle East. Michael Dell mentioned it at a press conference in Dubai but offered no details and early reports suggested Dubai was going to make a direct investment in Dell a la AMD, which may be what happens. Both Dow Jones and Bloomberg quote Michael Dell as saying he'd welcome an investment from the oil-rich emirate. Local papers quote Telcom CEO Abdulatif Almulla as saying, 'We are considering some strategic initiatives.'

Quest Software has expanded its set of solutions to help organizations plan, deploy and manage their IT infrastructures by maximizing their investment in the Microsoft System Center Platform. Quest will unveil its comprehensive solutions, including the availability of Quest Management Extensions - Configuration Manager 2007 Edition and the Quest Management Pack for Oracle - Operations Manager 2007 Edition. Quest is also announcing dedicated initiatives supporting Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross-Platform Management Extensions and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Performance & Resource Optimization (PRO) feature.

Egenera announced the Dell PAN System as a key component of Dell's virtualization solutions portfolio. Dell and Egenera are partnering to deliver the dynamic data center to customers -- making virtualization and data center automation a reality beyond the blade chassis. The Dell PAN system is built on proven PowerEdge 1950 and 2950 servers, Dell|EMC storage, and Citrix XenServer -- all factory-integrated as a complete, turn-key solution that virtualizes and pools compute, networking and storage resources into scalable, changeable assets that can be applied and managed based on business requirements.

International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

The VMware Fusion team announced the release of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 for public download. VMware also announced VMware Fusion 2.0 will be a free downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x users. VMware Fusion Beta 1 ships with new features.

Virtualization is a strategic initiative at Dell and so we have spent considerable time planning and seeking the requirements of hundreds of our customers of all types and sizes and across many geographies. What we found was pretty revealing, although not particularly surprising: virtualization has matured to the point where it is not just viewed as a red-hot, 'solve everything' technology, but as an effective means for our customers to meet specific business needs and objectives.

When it comes to defining the role of virtualization, there are two camps: 1) Virtualization is a platform - represented by VMware; 2) Virtualization is a feature - represented by Parallels, Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, SUN, Novell, Oracle.

Ceedo Technologies has developed patent-pending virtualization technology that takes a suite of standard off-the-shelf Windows applications, and virtualizes them in real-time, creating a portable virtual desktop, which launches on any Windows host PC with no need to pre-install any software, drivers or agents. Ceedo's portable virtual desktop runs on top of and leverages the exiting Windows OS on the host PC, thus eliminating the licensing costs, footprint and performance penalty of a full virtualized OS, and works fully in user mode, enabling operation on locked-down PCs. Ceedo's technology enables the most cost-effective solutions for many enterprise scenarios such as remote access, disaster recovery, and creating a managed enterprise 'island' on employee-owned and subcontractor-owned PCs. Ceedo provides the Enterprise IT with tools to fully customize the user interface, remotely deploy new applications, and update existing applications.

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Synopsys announced that NextIO has standardized on the VMM methodology, as defined in the Verification Methodology Manual (VMM) for SystemVerilog, and on Synopsys' VCS functional verification product to accelerate the SystemVerilog-based verification of their newest I/O virtualization chip design. Pairing the VMM methodology with the VCS tool enabled NextIO to efficiently build highly accurate system-level and unit-level simulation environments that identify design bugs. This complete verification environment enabled NextIO to achieve first-pass functional silicon success.

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

Forum Systems announced the availability of FS Sentry 7.1, the SOA Gateway product. FS Sentry 7.1 enables rapid integration within a SOA without compromising security. FS Sentry 7.1 provides SOA professionals the ability to virtualize and centralize disparate service endpoints. Service virtualization and aggregation across complex WSDL enables SOA deployments to simplify their service publishing and consumption process. By using modern identity management systems such as Sun Access Manager or HP Select Access, administrators can provide granular, operation-level control to their ever-expanding SOA deployments.

Parallels announced it has signed an agreement with myLittleTools to resell myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005, the web-based management tool designed for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The application enables service providers to manage most database and server objects, such as tables, views, programmability and security objects, through a web browser.

The Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance is a self contained software stack of o/s, database, and business intelligence tools. The solution is provided in a single stream install enabling a rapid and easy deployment of a complete BI environment within a VM. The software appliance comes with an online web service update mechanism to manage patches and upgrades in a seamless fashion. Users apply updates to the entire multi-component stack with a single click. Users are able to stay current and online with their BI investment at a significantly lower cost. The solution is built from open source technologies from Ingres, JasperSoft, & rPath.

CACHEfx appliances deliver high I/O operations per second and low latency to accelerate the performance of data intensive applications. The appliances scale to multiple terabytes of capacity and attach to the network, complementing both traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) deployments and clustered file systems. Serving requests from high speed memory provides applications a throughput increase and real time access to data. Large files, data sets, and entire databases are reliably cached to accelerate I/O performance.

Infinite Group announced plans to expand its Virtualization Practice to the state government and commercial markets. IGI's Virtualization Practice has focused on the Federal Civilian Agency market so the expansion will leverage that expertise to pursue the growing Virtualization market in State and Private Industry segments while continuing growth in the Federal market including Civilian and Department of Defense activities.

PlateSpin provides a unified suite of solutions to help enterprises adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualization in the data center. PlateSpin's patent-pending workload profiling and portability technology liberates software from hardware and streams server workloads (data, applications and operating systems) over the network between physical and virtual infrastructures. The freedom to drag and drop workloads onto the physical or virtual hosts where they will run most efficiently ensures the best fit between server resource supply and application workload demands. Global 2000 companies use PlateSpin solutions to lower costs, boost operational efficiencies and solve today's most pressing data center challenges including server consolidation, hardware migration and disaster recovery.

The conference theme of the Virtualization Conference & Expo Europe, to be held in London, England, January 26-27, 2009, is 'Deploying Virtualization in the Enterprise.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

Babya announced the upcoming release of Virtual Application Platinum. Babya Virtual Application Platinum is a software virtualization solution designed for applications-such as small utilities. It can handle the virtualization of multiple applications.