Features

• 12 hybrid security products to watch

  Securing a hybrid cloud is not the same thing as deploying hybrid security products.

• New York, New Jersey financial sector well prepared for Hurricane Sandy

  Lessons from 9/11 have helped ensure the financial services sector in New York and New Jersey is prepared for disasters, and even shorted the time to recover when regional events happen.

• Virtual machine management (VMM)

  Australia may be one of the most mature markets when it comes to the adoption of server virtualizaton, many organisations’ approach to managing virtual server machines, or VMs, could be described as ‘immature’, Tim Lohman, finds.

• Motorola Atrix hints at a virtualized, cloud future

  Motorola announced the Atrix smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show, and while many have been concentrating on its 4G connectivity and clever desktop dock that lets it run a cut-down Linux desktop on a full-sized monitor, nearly everybody has missed something very important.

• Burning questions: Virtualisation

  Virtualizing x86 infrastructure isn't just a one-step process -- as servers change, the whole data center must change as well. While server hypervisors such as VMware's ESX, Microsoft's Hyper-V and Xen can make IT more efficient and cost-effective, many of the virtualization advantages can be canceled out when data centers rely on technology and processes that haven't been updated for the virtualization age.

• Product Guide: SAN and NAS virtualisation

  In just a few short years, storage virtualization, also known as block virtualization, has proven its worth in the large enterprise and traveled that well-worn path from pricey boutique solution to affordable commodity. As a standard feature in all but the most modest mid-tier storage arrays, storage virtualization soothes a wide range of storage management woes for small and mid-size organizations. At the same time, dedicated solutions from top-tier vendors deliver the greatest ROI to large shops managing large SANs with intense data availability requirements.

• Inside Amazon's Cloud: Just How Many Customer Projects?

  There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.

• QEMU virtualization reaches 0.11, brings 1400 changes

  Open source virtualization app QEMU has reached version 0.11 and brings some 1400 changes from 90 contributors.

• VMware cloud initiative raises vendor lock-in concerns

  VMware talks a good game about interoperability, but its cloud initiative threatens to introduce a type of vendor lock-in that rival virtualization vendors claim they would not impose.