Key factors to consider when purchasing KVM-over-IP solutions
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(Source: Raritan)  This white paper addresses the full range of issues regarding the purchase of KVM-over-IP solutions today - including Virtual Media, access and power redundancy, security and cost.  Make more informed buying decisions and ensure that you get maximum value out of every dollar invested in KVM-over-IP technology.
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Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
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(InfoWorld) - VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum has poured tepid water on the recent acquisition of open-source virtualization vendor XenSource by remote desktop company Citrix as well as outlining his demands to the chip vendors. He made his remarks during an exclusive interview with Techworld at virtualization industry event VMworld, during which he also outlined what additional support for virtualization he wants the chip vendors to provide. Commenting from a technology perspective on the Citrix buy-out, which was announced last month, Rosenblum said: "If I were in Citrix's shoes, would I have gone in that direction? There is a layer to control -- I can see it from that point of view as they've long suffered from being on top of Microsoft.... I can see why they might do it, but there are a lot of challenges." Rosenblum also laid out a blueprint for some of the issues he'd like to see the AMD and Intel tackle. He said that VMware didn't always get what it wanted from the processor makers and that VMware needed more visibility into how virtual machines use the processor cache in order to provide better quality of service. In particular, he referred to the problem of a VM demanding huge amounts of processor resource that affected other processor cores. He said: "We've made great steps, but if you have a 10-gig NIC with tiny packets coming, it can consume a whole CPU just looking at each of them, so it's really difficult trying to match line rate." Rosenblum also claimed that his comments about virtualization being a threat to Windows were taken out of context. He said: "Journalists like to put things in headlines that I actually didn't say.... The point was that once you have the virtualization layer driving the hardware, that's taken away some of the functionality of the OS, which gives the OS a chance to focus on its other major goal, which is still very much needed in the application environment. So where modern OSes have gone is to control hardware and the application and are running into a dead end."
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Showing just how hot the virtualization market has become, Intel has taken a minority stake in VMware, now owned by enterprise storage company EMC. Intel is investing $218.5 million for 2.5 percent of all outstanding VMware common stock, and will gain control of one board seat.
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Frustrated by sub-par, outsourced customer service and technical support? Would you be willing to pay a premium for onshore service?
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The hardware networking company is trying to break out of the doldrums.
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Is this the right book to introduce Microsoft power users to Linux?
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
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Another take on some of the issues faced when purchasing a new computer.
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Read this white paper featuring VMware and LeftHand to learn about the true costs of storage and server sprawl, proven approaches to virtualization, and methods to maximize ROI using virtual machines on iSCSI SANs.
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THERE is never a right time to buy technology. Something cheaper, faster and better specified will be on the market before you have even got your product out of its box.
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(Source: Raritan)  Talpa TV required an IT management solution that could accommodate rapid business growth and manage servers across many dispersed locations. The company chose Raritan's Dominion KX KVM-over-IP solution to provide simultaneous access and control of 80 servers.
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(InfoWorld) - As large enterprises embrace the concept of virtualization to more efficiently manage their information technology systems, vendors are now targeting the small-to-medium size market. VMwareÂ on Monday is introducing a new low-cost service plan to give small-to-medium businesses (SMB) a taste of what virtualization can do for them. It's entry level bundle includes a free download of the VMware Server software for virtualizing servers and a $1,500 support plan called Virtual Center. Although less than the $5,000 support program for enterprise customers, the $1,500 support plan is limited to three two-socket physical servers that could be converted into multiple virtual servers. If an SMB customer wants to virtualize more servers, the support would cost an extra $400 for each extra server. Virtualization refers to the practice of managing a data center holistically to make the best use of the hardware available, reduce the capital cost of new servers and the operational cost of electricity to run them. Virtualization software like VMware Server makes it possible for one server to run multiple software applications at the same time. VMware sees growth potential in the SMB market, given that 70 percent of 1.2 million downloads of the free VMware Server software since June 2006 have been to SMB customers, said Ben Matheson, vice president of product management for VMware, a division of storage vendor EMC. He defines small-to-medium businesses as those with fewer than 1,000 employees or an average of 100 physical servers in their businesses. "There is a lot of market awareness of the value of virtualization in the enterprise...but we think it's useful for all companies," said Matheson. He anticipates many of the SMBs downloading the free VMware Server are just taking virtualization out for a test drive. "There are definitely a lot of trials, getting it into their labs and using things like virtual appliances and testing them. But there is also quite a bit of production use," he said. Server vendors have also been making overtures to the SMB market. Hewlett-Packard began offeringÂ a Virtualization Assessment Service on Feb. 1 to analyze an IT infrastructure to see how it might benefit from virtualization. The service is being offered through HP's resellers who typically serve its SMB customers, while HP's own sales and engineering force tends to large enterprise customers. IBM even calls its initiative a "Virtualization Test Drive." IBM launched in 2006 a virtualization education and sales initiative targeted at SMBs. IBM said that more than 65 percent of their virtualization sales are driven by IBM partners targeting SMBs.
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I need to expand my idea of a secure computing ecosystem into the real world. Let me explain.
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By Vaisman, Fima  Fiber cabling is best for IP security networks, but connectivity may not always be possible. Digital video surveillance is becoming a distributed IP network application.
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Analysis: Dual- and quad-core systems add power, but customers wonder whether the they're worth the cost.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard has begun shipping a new product that the company thinks will give it an edge over rival IBMÂ in the market for blade servers. Beginning Tuesday, HP is set to begin delivering Virtual Connect, a management tool for its BladeSystem c-Class servers to more easily add blade servers to a network. Using Virtual Connect, which the company announced in June 2006, an enterprise can set up its data center network infrastructure ahead of time and then more easily add, subtract, change or move around servers as needed. Currently, enterprises deploy switches in their datacenter networks to connect servers to storage appliances. They're relatively cheap, but each of those switches is one more piece of hardware on the network that administrators need to manage, said Mark Potter, vice president of HP's BladeSystem business. Another alternative is to install a "patch panel," which doesn't require any separate management but is very expensive to deploy. Adding servers is also very time-consuming and requires the involvement of a company's server manager, network manager, storage manager, and others, Potter said. What should be a 30-minute task can sometimes take hours or even days. One HP customer told Potter it once took 58 days. "You know when they give you a number like 58 days that they've measured it and they're not happy about it," he said. Virtual Connect is built in to the datacenter infrastructure when it is first created. Then new servers can be simply plugged in and turned on. "We can wire up the infrastructure one time, physically, and basically walk away," Potter said. "Then the server admin can add, replace, and change servers on the fly without ever impacting the networking admin or the storage admin." Virtual Connect is hardware and middleware that sits between the blade server and the network switches that connect to storage. Virtual Connect for a network using Ethernet switches carries a starting list price of $5,699. For Fibre Channel networks, it starts at $9,499. Also Tuesday, HP is set to begin shipping a new blade server, the ProLiant xw460c (list price: $4,329), which HP describes as the first workstation blade for the c-Class blade product line. Virtual Connect is a unique solution to a data center headache, said Gordon Haff, principal analyst with Illuminata. "Virtual Connect does not eliminate [the work of configuring a network]. It still might take three or four weeks to do all that," Haff said. "But the idea is that you can basically do it once." Figures released Feb. 21 by Gartner show that IBM is the top blade seller but HP is gaining. HP's share of the x86 platform blade market, based on revenue, rose to 33 percent in 2006 from 32 percent in 2005, while IBM's fell to 40 percent from 42 percent, said Jeffrey Hewitt, a Gartner analyst. At the same time, though, the x86 blade market is growing. Global blade server revenue grew to $2.7 billion in 2006 from $2 billion in 2005 and unit shipments grew to 727,000 from 548,000 the year before, according to the Gartner report.