NEC follows the path of XenSource
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Finding peace with virtualisation deal XenSource has signed an agreement with NEC which it hopes will push demand and boost sales for its virtualisation server platform, XenEnterprise.â¦
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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
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NEC has unveiled its latest supercomputer, which is almost twice as fast as the BlueGene/L machine rolled out by IBM in September.
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(InfoWorld) - In 2006, many enterprise IT groups saw the potential in virtualization, rushed to consolidate servers and subsequently propelledÂ VMwareÂ software to a market-leading spot. As 2007 begins, VMware's prices are under attack, just as more CIOs look to virtualization to control server and storage sprawl and tame data center power costs. For starters, VMware rivals XenSource and Virtual Iron Software have launched new open-source alternatives, undercutting VMware on price. Also, new processors, such as IBM's Power 5 and upcoming Power 6 chips, and new operating systems have virtualization capabilities built in, negating the need for some additional software, says Clay Ryder, president of The Sageza Group. Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 OS includes a virtualization feature it calls Containers. MicrosoftÂ is expected to release a beta version of Windows Virtual Server in the first quarter of 2007 and ship it a year later. That's good news: As virtualization features become part of the hardware or the OS, software providers will have to offer useful extra features, Ryder says, such as automated new software testing or security patch management. Virtual Iron introduced Version 3.1Â of its virtualization platform in December for a license price of $499 per socket--compared to $2,875 per socket for a comparable VMware license. XenSource also introduced new virtualization products at sub-$1,000 prices. Both XenSource and Virtual Iron build their proprietary products on top of the open-source Xen platform for virtualization hypervisors. (A hypervisor lets a computer run multiple operating systems at once.) VMware's products are not based on open source. Meanwhile, middleware vendor BEA Systems is making its own cost-cutting move. In the first half of 2007,Â BEA plans to releaseÂ WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), a version of its Java application server that includes Liquid VM--a BEA-specific Java Virtual Machine that lets Java applications run directly on a hypervisor without requiring an operating system to be present. This will let users substantially reduce the amount of computer power, lowering the hardware costs per application, says Guy Churchward, vice president and general manager of the Java Runtime Products Group at BEA Systems. Initially, Liquid VM will work only with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor. Analysts advise CIOs planning for virtualization in 2007 to think strategically, not just tactically. "To really make virtualization work you want to do it so end users access capability, not just specific machines," Ryder says. "That's only going to be possible if you take a strategic approach," he says, noting that virtualization needs to be applied to storage, networking and the introduction of new software, not just servers. Mike Williams, CIO for the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), learned a lesson about thinking strategically when he did a virtualization project in 2006. (The DCMA, a federal Department of Defense agency, places contract managers inside companies fulfilling defense contracts for weapons systems, jets, military equipment and parts.) Williams deployed VMware, reducing the agency's number of servers to 160 from 560 and the number of data centers to three from 17. But that move taxed the WAN when all the network traffic converged on the three data centers. His advice: Optimize the WAN first. Still, Williams likes the results. Before virtualization, DCMA replaced about one-third of its 560 servers annually at a cost of about $2 million, Williams says; virtualization cut that expense to $560,000.
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Mozilla is trying to weave a new web. Not sure if it matters yet.
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Thin-client computing has been around for a decade, but the rising costs of updating software and installing security patches on networked personal computers is sparking renewed interest
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Network appliance will announce this week additional capabilities and partnerships for its NetApp NetCache line of Internet security appliances. Meanwhile, EMC will unveil a major upgrade to its ILM (information life cycle management) product line with a focus on adding application-aware components.
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The company launches an open-source software effort to further its plans to make Fibre Channel over Ethernet a reality.
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Yet another communications-infrastructure player reports promising results.
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Web site reveals future plans for Xeon, Pentium 4 processors.
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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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Citrix Systems made a slew of product announcements on Monday that leverages the 18-year-old application-delivery company's technology to make it a major player in virtualization, unified communications, regulatory compliance, and green technology.At its App Delivery Expo, in Las Vegas, Citrix announced the completion of the acquisition of XenSource, a virtual machine infrastructure provider, that will put the company squarely in competition with VMware.At the show Citrix also announced a unified communications technology, EasyCall, that, when embedded in line of business applications, will allow users to initiate click-to-call communications within a company's existing corporate phone system.SmartAuditor will monitor, record, and play back application sessions as a core capability of its existing Presentation Server solution and is targeted at compliance and regulatory requirements from the SEC, HIPAA (Health Insurance and Accountability Act), and others.Along with Hewlett Packard, Citrix also announced a datacenter solution, PowerSmart, to reduce datacenter power consumption.This technology will also become a component of Presentation Server infrastructure.With the close of the XenSource deal, Citrix will create a Virtualization and Management Division within Citrix rather than simply folding the technology within the Citrix product line. Peter Levine, XenSource CEO, will head up the new division.What remains to be seen if the rest of the industry, particularly former contributors to the Xen project like IBM, Dell, AMD, and HP, will continue to support the underlying open-source virtualization engine.Also in question is what Microsoft will do when it unveils its virtualization solution.Citrix and Microsoft have worked together to deliver Windows applications on Citrix technology. The question is whether Microsoft will continue to give Citrix products the kind of inside support that it has enjoyed up until now.For their part, Citrix officials believe that it is it the only company that offers an end- to-end application delivery solution that can leverage application, desktop, and server virtualization all in one fell swoop.Citrix's desktop virtualization technology integrates Citrix hypervisor, provisioning technology, and desktop delivery technology into a single offering, according to Wes Wasson, a senior vice president at Citrix.Up until now, a company's only choice would be to buy separate point solutions from different vendors and integrate them after the fact.The EasyCall communications capability will be a standard feature in the Platinum Edition of Citrix NetScaler for Web applications and Citrix Presentation Server for Windows.Although EasyCall does not possess all of the capabilities of a unified communications solution, it will allow users to roll a mouse over any phone number, found in the main corporate directory, in any application.A pop-up dialer allows a user to click on any one of the multiple numbers that might appear -- home, mobile, or office, for example.EasyCall is available as part of Citrix Communications Gateway appliance and is priced at $3,500. It can support approximately 10,000 users.SmartAuditor is similar in design to a digital video recorder that captures screen activity from an end-user's PC and stores it in a digitally signed, time-stamped video files.SmartAuditor is available now.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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New management, new credo, same old enemy Interop The virtualization hypervisor belongs in server hardware - not in the operating system. So says Xensource, friend and partner of the operating system giants Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell.â¦
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SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 18  /PRNewswire/ -- NEC Electronics America, Inc. today introduced to the Americas two new additions to its lineup of system LSI chips based on the enhanced multimedia architecture (EMMA(R)) platform.
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NEC Corp. researchers have developed a quantum cryptography system with sufficient speed and range to make it commercially viable. It could go on sale in the second half of 2005, the researchers said Thursday.