Friday | 5 December, 2008
Virtualisation
News
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Gartner's Top 10 disruptive data-center technologies 05/12/2008 06:06:00
Pod-like data center construction and the evolution of blade servers make Gartner's Top 10 listA new computing fabric to replace today's blade servers and a "pod" approach to building data centers are two of the most disruptive technologies that will affect the enterprise data center in the next few years, Gartner said at its annual data center conference Wednesday. - +
VMware releases revamped desktop software 04/12/2008 08:08:00
VMware has released new software aimed at providing desktop and application virtualization, as well as management of virtual desktops, in one product.VMware has released VMware View 3, new software aimed at providing desktop virtualization, application virtualization and management of virtual desktops in one product. - +
Supercomputers finding their way to the desktop 02/12/2008 07:30:00
Nvidia announced the release of Tesla-based desktop supercomputersIf the definition of a personal supercomputer is that it is inexpensive, can sit on a desk and is at least within shouting distance of the Top500 systems list, new machines equipped with Nvidia's Tesla graphics processor are among the first in that category. - +
HR group builds virtual DR with VMware 01/12/2008 10:18:00
Management complexity of business continuity significantly reducedHuman resources consulting firm Chandler Macleod Group has revitalised its IT operations by using virtualisation to build virtual disaster recovery and consolidate its server infrastructure. - +
Parallels virtualization app upgrade sparks Mac user outcry 27/11/2008 08:14:00
Desktop for Mac 4.0 under fire on support forums, company says 'small number' affectedThe CEO of Parallels Tuesday defended the recent upgrade of his company's Mac virtualization software as a "quality product" and said that negative comments from users had been overblown because the firm doesn't edit its support forums.
Features
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10 Microsoft research projects 02/12/2008 10:09:00
A sneak peek at 10 technologies developed in Microsoft's R&D labsInnovation is not just about cool new products. In technology, the best ideas require a) really smart people and b) lots of funding. For the past 33 years, Microsoft has had both in spades. - +
Moving a Data Center Into the Cloud 28/11/2008 08:40:00
How planning disaster recovery and ended up a big cost-saving strategyA year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs. - +
Why developers prefer Macs 18/11/2008 09:34:00
Apple systems have become the tools of choice for coders of all kinds, but not without a few aches and painsWhen Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. Instead of starting up another machine, asking a colleague with a Mac, or simply ignoring those crazy followers of Steve Jobs, Weaver just pops over to the browser in another window. That's easy because Visual Studio is running on Windows inside a Parallels virtual machine, which, in turn, runs on his Mac. He has a PC, a Mac, and a Unix development box all in one. - +
Making sense of Microsoft's Azure 07/11/2008 08:38:00
What app developers and enterprises need to know before signing up for Microsoft's cloud platformLast week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen. - +
Stormy weather: 7 gotchas in cloud computing 04/11/2008 08:33:00
Users hit turbulence on the trip to cloud computingWhen the computer industry buys into a buzzword, it's like getting a pop song stuck in your head. It's all you hear. Worse, the same half-dozen questions about the hyped trend are incessantly paraded out, with responses that succeed mainly in revealing how poorly understood the buzzword actually is.
Case Studies
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Planning virtualization moves wisely 26/05/2008 09:58:01
CiRBA's data center intelligence toolNot so long ago, if Underwriters Laboratories needed to add three additional servers worth of computing power in three weeks, the company just bought three new units, says Kent Walker, manager of computer operations for UL. With more time for capacity analysis - which is both labor and time-intensive - Walker might be able to shift resources around and stave off the purchase. But when the need is immediate, there's no time for that.
Interviews
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The inside view of Microsoft's cloud strategy 03/11/2008 08:32:00
The project lead explains why the hypervisor is not Hyper-V, how multitenant apps are supported, and why Azure is not like Amazon's EC2Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud. - +
McAfee looks to security in virtual environments 21/10/2008 09:36:00
DeWalt says the company's products will share common management, reportingMcAfee is hunkering down to integrate the security technologies it has bought over the past several months into its varied line of security software and appliances. Two trends in the company's activities are developing parallel products for deployment as software on endpoints and as network-based appliances. This week, for instance, the company is announcing that NAC software can be installed on its IntruShield IPS appliance to give customers the option of enforcing NAC policies in the network, not just on the endpoint. The company is bringing management of these platforms under control of its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in an effort to centralize control of network security. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene spoke with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt about these efforts as well as other issues facing the company. - +
Microsoft: We're not afraid of the cloud 25/09/2008 09:44:00
'I don't envy' VMware CEO Paul Maritz, Microsoft server exec saysMicrosoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others - +
Q&A: VMware CEO Maritz on his new gig, competing against Microsoft and the virtual server 'time bomb' 18/09/2008 10:35:00
Maritz talks about competing in the hot virtualization marketPaul Maritz became the president and CEO of VMware in July, after the EMC-owned company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. Maritz is now competing in the hot virtualization market against his former employer Microsoft, where he worked from 1986 to 2000 and led many of the company's major software initiatives. EMC executives put him in charge of VMware just a few months after EMC acquired Pi Corporation, a company Maritz founded. Maritz was in Las Vegas this week for VMware's annual VMworld conference, and sat down with Jon Brodkin to talk about company strategy. - +
Exec: MS virtualization one-third the price of VMware's 09/09/2008 10:43:00
Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing talks about Microsoft's virtualization strategies.Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.
Opinions
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Cloud computing. More than blue sky thinking 28/11/2008 10:23:00
If the drip, drip, drip effect of cloud computing works for some of the most popular IT services of today, you can be sure it will seep into mainstream IT soon.Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day. - +
AMD bails out IT 17/11/2008 10:46:00
AMD's faster, cooler, less expensive Shanghai 45nm server CPU maximizes 2P rack server value when IT needs it mostThere's a good deal that's special about AMD's new Shanghai server CPU. It's fabulous science, fun for those of us who get dewy-eyed over the prospect of a 25 percent faster world switch time and immersion lithography. It makes the x86 battle interesting again because it carries AMD into territory that it must fight hard to win--the two-socket (2P) server space--and where innovation is sorely needed. AMD beat Intel's next-generation server architecture to market while closing performance, price, and power efficiency gaps between Core 2 and Shanghai. Just as it did in the old days, AMD now claims that its best outruns Intel's best despite having a lower clock speed. - +
Storing your data in their cloud 07/11/2008 09:34:00
Online file storage can help many small businessesAlthough it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider? - +
Reinventing storage virtualization 02/10/2008 10:26:00
What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization?The initial approach to storage virtualization, which has been around for years, was to address it in the storage-area network because the SAN sat between the storage and servers, and would cause the least disruption to these systems. However, after nearly a decade, this approach has not taken off while server virtualization has become widely accepted. What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization? - +
Testing environment management challenges with virtualisation 26/09/2008 11:16:00
Virtualisation brings challenges and great opportunities for improving the delivery and management of environments for software development and testing.Many IT projects have encountered environment related issues and defects that impact the test and development teams and are the cause of significant delays to projects. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of effort during the software development life-cycle is wasted due to these types of issues.
Reviews
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Review: Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 24/10/2008 07:50:00
Every UI feature is extensible via PowerShellOn Tuesday, Microsoft released to manufacturing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The final code will be shipped on November 1. The company bills the software as one-stop organization, allowing administrators to set up and deploy new virtual machines and manage hosts and other virtual infrastructure elements from one console. - +
The virtual winner: VMware's ESX KOs a roughly built Hyper-V package 03/10/2008 10:33:00
VMware wins due to manageability, stability that comes with maturityWhen the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion. - +
The issue of virtual compatibility 03/10/2008 11:02:00
MS has the hardware support, but VMware supports more operating systemsBoth hypervisors we tested have requirements for the hardware they can run on and the virtual machines they can support. - +
How we tested the virtualization products 03/10/2008 10:57:00
We used the same host platform, an HP DL580 G5 (four-socket, 16-core Intel Xeon CPUs) server – for the qualitative portion of this test as we did in the quantitative portion of our test published earlier this month. - +
Review: Citrix hits the VDI high notes 17/09/2008 08:21:00
Citrix XenDesktop 2.0 leverages streaming applications, server virtualization, and swift tools for a scalable and manageable virtual desktop infrastructure solutionIt seems that the whole world has been talking about VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), with very different views of what VDI actually means. If virtualization itself is an adolescent, VDI is still an infant, and thus there are still plenty of growing pains to come.
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Weekly Tech News Update: 5th December, 2008Microsoft's possible revived interest in Yahoo, Europe cracks down on airline ticket selling websites and Christmas comes to Sony.
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Virtualisation Knowledge Centre
PARTNER CONTENT
Unisys Real Time Infrastructure solutions embody Unisys “less is more” approach to IT infrastructure, freeing IT organisations to deploy a simplified, more easily managed IT infrastructure that allows them to spend less time on routine management activities and more time on strategic initiatives that advance the business.
Virtualisation Knowledge Centre
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Virtualisation Knowledge Centre supported by Unisys and Intel
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Click on the link below to see Real Time Infrastructure defined and an explanation of its key benefits. You can also hear how Unisys has embraced RTI in its own IT infrastructure.
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Podcast
Click on the link below to hear Unisys RTI expert Al Bender discuss virtualisation trends and issues.
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Whitepapers
The Virtualisation Landscape to 2010
This white paper provides insights on the further evolution of virtualisation now and through to 2010, what it will do to IT infrastructure, its role within business for those who embrace it and the detrimental impact on those who don’t.
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Good for Business - Virtualisation in Perspective
Data centres are a critical component of modern business strategies, and their importance is continually growing. But so is the cost of running and supporting them. This paper looks at the urgent challenges facing organisations and their data centres, and explores some of the ways in which technology can help to address them.
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Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite
The Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite helps your organisation overcome the challenges of creating an optimised IT infrastructure with cutting-edge technology and services. As such, it is an integral component of the Unisys Real-Time Infrastructure – a long-term vision of what business and IT can achieve together.
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Comparing Multi-Core Server Virtualisation
Intel IT tested servers based on select Intel multi-core processors to analyse the potential role of each in data center server virtualisation strategies. Each server provided significant potential benefits in performance, power consumption per workload, and operating costs over older servers running non-virtualised workloads.
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Comparing Two & Four Socket Platforms for Server Virtualisation
Intel IT tested servers based on select Intel multi-core processors to analyse the potential role of each in data center server virtualisation strategies. Each server provided significant potential benefits in performance, power consumption per workload, and operating costs over older servers running non-virtualised workloads.
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Implementing Virtualisation in a Global Business-Computing Environment
Intel IT planned, engineered, and has begun deploying a virtualised business-computing production environment at several data centers, a rollout that will continue through 2008. The initiative has already confirmed anticipated virtualisation benefits such as faster, more automated deployment. Intel are initially consolidating older servers running applications that are not mission-critical; with opportunities to achieve 16:1 consolidation ratios using two-socket virtualisation hosts based on Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors.
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