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.'

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

MokaFive, another me-too desktop virtualization company, this one started in 2005 by three Stanford PhDs and their professor, Moka chief scientist Monica Lam, is in the process of pushing out its widgetry, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It started going commercial a few weeks ago with a preview paid for by angel money supplied by Sun founder Vinod Khosla and Sun's old strategy chief Bill Raduchel.

ClearCube announced the company's latest successes with strong market demand, technology innovations, customer and partner success. ClearCube's continued high standing in the centralized computing space is demonstrated by the company's momentum in a series of corporate developments over the past year.

Skytap Virtual Lab, is a virtual lab solution available as a service over the Web. It enables application development and test teams to provision lab infrastructure on demand (including servers, software, networking and storage) and utilize a powerful virtual lab management application to automate the set-up, testing and tear down of complex, multi-tiered environments. It also gives distributed teams the capability to collaborate and rapidly resolve software defects using a virtual lab and virtual project environment.

Greg Lyon is an IT professional with over 25 years experience in Software Development, Project Management, Sales Engineering, and Business Development. For the last three years Greg has worked at Egenera where he has held positions as a Senior Sales Engineer, Sales Engineer Manager, and most recently as the National Technology Director for the Egenera/Dell OEM partnership. Prior to Egenera Greg worked for several startups in a technical sales capacity.

Dell was supposed to cut 10% of its workforce, about 8,800 jobs. That was last year's plan. Now it's saying it will go deeper in an effort to save $3 billion a year by 2011. Michael Dell made the announcement Thursday at the company's first meeting with financial analysts in three years because of the trouble it got into with the SEC. 'To be very clear,' he said, 'we are not satisfied with the current state of affairs and are on a mission to fix it. There are no fixed costs at Dell. Everything is being looked at.'

Existing storage management methods and tools can't keep pace with exploding storage requirements. Application expansion, digital media formats, and regulatory compliance have all contributed to the fast-growing demand. According to IDC, storage administrator productivity has to increase 60% a year just to keep up with the anticipated growth in storage capacity. To make matters worse, 24x7 data access requirements are closing the management windows available to administrators to do management tasks.

VMware announced strategic enhancements to its channel partner programs. The enhancements build on initiatives announced in February 2008 to enhance the VMware VIP Partner Program, helping VMware's more than 13,000 partners around the world that resell VMware virtualization solutions by accelerating partners' expertise, profitability and opportunity in VMware virtualization.

So, the geniuses in Chatsworth, California, who picked up the remains of Fawcette Technical Publications from the bank in Virginia, and the remains of 101 Communications, another platform play that went seriously south, sat down in a room this afternoon and said 'What is SYS-CON up to these days?' The guy left over from Fawcette days and still employed said, 'Well we used to follow their news announcements and announce the same products, but by the time we could get around to what needs to be done, we were usually one year behind SYS-CON. And then we went out of business pretty much.' So the guy who makes the decisions in the room, as in the FedEx commercial, said: 'OK, we will announce a Virtualization Website and a Virtualization Conference!'

Tek-Tools Software announced that its growth continues with 40 new customers and several existing customers expanding installations of Profiler Suite in the first quarter of 2008. Increasingly, new and existing customers are demanding capabilities in their IT infrastructure management software solution to manage virtualized and physical IT assets.

Egenera announced its support for Fujitsu Siemens Computers' launch of ServerView PAN Manager on PRIMERGY blade servers. The two companies first established a successful OEM relationship centered on the Egenera BladeFrame system in 2005, amassing a strong enterprise customer base in more than 20 countries, including wins in the service provider, financial services and government sectors. Late in 2007, Fujitsu Siemens Computers was introduced as Egenera's first OEM for Egenera PAN Manager software. With the launch, Fujitsu Siemens Computers delivers on its vision to integrate PAN Manager as a key component of its Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) solutions for the Dynamic Data Center.

Insystek announced that it has entered into a reseller agreement and partnership with Remote IT Solutions, a premier reseller and service provider the UK North West area with strong competencies within the emerging technology and virtualization fields including VMware, Citrix, Symantec, Thinstall and Microsoft as well as others.

VMware announced that its virtualization solutions are saving customers tons in costs and CO2 emissions. Using VMware virtualization, customers can consolidate 10 or more physical machines onto a single server and reduce power consumption and cost by 80-90 percent. VMware customers that have moved from a 1:1 application to server ratio to 60:1 or higher have achieved millions of dollars in capital and operational savings.

AMD, which hasn't penetrated the commercial space, is gonna try to pick up some share with a Business Class line of energy-efficient commercial desktops and notebooks targeted at SMBs, government and education. The desktops are based on seven AMD 'image stable' new triple-core and quad-core Phenom and dual-core Athlon chips good for the next two years; the laptops will use the company's upcoming Puma platform, due in the second half.

GemStone Systems and Synechron announced a strategic partnership to address key customer pain points. Through the implementation and integration of GemStone solutions with existing enterprise applications, customers will be able to achieve low-latency, predictable, high-throughput data sharing and event distribution. GemStone and Synechron will work in close coordination on several key projects and complement each other's business domain and technology expertise to deliver turnkey solutions to clients.

Veeam Software introduced a program designed to support and enhance the virtualization practices of top value-added resellers, systems integrators and consultants. Veeam ProPartner includes a members-only online portal with fast access to NFR license keys, discounts on Veeam software for resale, lead qualification support, direct access to Veeam engineering and support resources, co-marketing support programs, and a partners-only knowledgebase that will grow over time. As a 100% channel-centric organization, Veeam is focused on supporting and driving partners' continued success.

Marathon Technologies announced that it has been named as a finalist for the Fifth Annual Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) Technology Awards. Marathon was awarded the distinction for developing everRun VM, the fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. everRun VM addresses one of the major factors that has limited the broader adoption of server virtualization -- a lack of simple and effective high availability technology for virtual environments.

Like many mid-sized enterprises, the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst was interested in consolidating servers to streamline operations, improve its storage architecture, reduce downtime and conserve resources. The school's outdated storage network, used primarily for operations (shared storage, faculty files documents, multimedia, etc.) along with student information and documents, was plagued with frequent service disruptions. This downtime was wreaking havoc with the network's user base - 145 full-time faculty and staff, plus 120 computer lab desktops that serve students.

Unison has launched a VMware appliance version of its Linux-based unified communications software, Unison. The Unison Virtual Appliance means that companies can deploy a complete unified communications solution in minutes. The virtual appliance includes a preconfigured Linux server with Unison Server already installed. This allows IT professionals to try the Unison beta with no cost and minimal setup time, by simply downloading and playing the virtual machine.

Virage Logic announced the selection of its Intelli Double Data Rate (DDR) Memory Controller interface solution by 3Leaf Systems, a provider of next-generation server virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, to deliver a silicon proven, high-performance DDR memory controller IP solution. By providing an all digital memory controller solution, and achieving maximum data throughput efficiency, Virage Logic's Intelli DDR solution allowed 3Leaf Systems to reach performance levels only achieved by mainframes. Virage Logic's ability to deliver 800Mbps with low latency and high-efficiency made the Intelli DDR solution a clear choice for the right combination of high-performance, low-power, and low-cost.

Apple picked up PA Semi, the low-power PowerPC start-up, last week to do who knows what with, and Sun picked up the assets of Montalvo Systems, the laconic, heading-for-the-crapper start-up that was supposed to be doing an Intel-competitive low-power/mobile four-core x86 chip for reasons it hasn't shared yet. It apparently plans to integrate the Montalvo technology into its own processors to what effect remains to be seen. Popular wisdom thinks Sun's interest has nothing to do with x86 compatibility.

In 2006 IDC released a study showing that the costs associated with data center management escalate at an alarming rate - in large part because of rising software management expenses. Virtualization has many definitions and uses in today's computing world, but three instances of virtualization are of key importance to solving the problems remaining in the data center after the implementation of state-based management and automation.

Intel and Cray, which when last seen was exclusively an AMD house and a feather in AMD's cap, are now going to work together on HPC and Cray's going to use the multi-core Xeon and fancy interconnect developments in future Cray servers, apparently starting in the so-called Cascade timeframe, say, 2010-2012. They're talking about tackling 'fundamental and historical problems of science and industry' and they plan to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next few years.

The Morph Application Platform for Java, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment and leverages cloud computing resources such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is now in limited developer preview. Webtide, the team behind Jetty, has brought that Java web server to the Morph Application Platform. Through its developer advice and support, Webtide has played a key role in the implementation of Java into the Morph Application Platform to extend the functionality to include deploying and delivering Java applications.

Enterprises of all sizes are building flexible storage infrastructures using Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and advanced virtualization technologies that let them allocate and shift SAN resources dynamically in response to the demands of their virtualized server environments.

I/O performance is of great importance to a hypervisor. I/O is also a huge maintenance burden, due to the large number of hardware devices that need to be supported, numerous I/O protocols, high availability options, and management for it all. VMware opted for the performance option, but putting the I/O stack in the hypervisor. Xen took the maintainability route.

Compellent announced that two of its financial services customers, Ares Management and Credit Union of Colorado, have reduced the physical and carbon footprint of their data centers, lowering the overall cost of ownership of their technology infrastructure. The efficient Compellent SAN has enabled both companies to measurably decrease hardware expenditures and the associated energy consumption.

Fortinet announced that Belgacom has selected Fortinet's consolidated network security solutions as the cornerstone of its 'Integrated Security Services,' part of 'Belgacom Explore.' Fortinet's FortiGate-5000 carrier-class systems along with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, two sophisticated management, logging and reporting tools, as well as Fortinet's FortiGuard Subscription Services will fuel Belgacom's launched managed security service.

The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) announced that Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), a supplier of secure embedded systems software and virtualization technology, is the newest member of the consortium's Hypervisor Subcommittee.

AMD announced that its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) has expanded its focus to include optimization and tuning advancements for Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris Operating System and Sun xVM Virtualization family of products. This extends AMD's commitment to work together with technology software partners to ensure that their OS and virtualization software layers are optimized to leverage AMD processor-based platforms' features. By expanding research and development on the OpenSolaris Operating System, the ORSC expects to help drive increased Solaris OS performance for business customers as well as feature enhancements on AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

NetApp announced that the Breckenridge Group (BGI) created a more efficient and effective storage environment with the recent implementation of the StoreVault S500 storage solution. BGI is a management firm specializing in the development, operations, and ongoing support of various restaurant and hotel locations throughout the western United States. BGI's IT environment consisted of 150 workstations and 250 PC-based point of sales (POS) terminals in the field along with 80 workstations, 14 physical servers, and 16 virtual servers that were located in the company's main office. With more than 4TB of direct-attached storage (DAS), the tasks of archiving, accessing, and backing up data were cumbersome.