Masters of Enterprise Servers: Brought to you by HP

Cisco, NetApp and VMware team up for dynamic data center

Cisco, NetApp and VMware announced Tuesday an expansion of their collaboration to deliver new architectures for improved efficiency, flexibility and security. The three companies introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that provides enhanced security in cloud environments by isolating the information technology (IT) resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

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Voltaire announces 40 Gigabit InfiniBand switch with integrated Ethernet gateway

Voltaire on Tuesday announced the industry’s first 40 Gbit/sec. InfiniBand switch with a built-in low latency Ethernet gateway for seamlessly bridging traffic to and from Ethernet-based networks. The Voltaire Grid Director 4036 features thirty-four, fully non-blocking 40 Gbit/sec. InfiniBand ports (delivering 2.72 Tbit/sec.), less than 100 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency, and two 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports bridging traffic in less than two microseconds.

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Mellanox 10 Gigabit Ethernet available through HP

Mellanox on Monday announced that is latency-sensitive ConnectX-2 EN controller is now available on the new HP NC542m Dual Port Flex-10 10GbE BLc Adapter directly from HP for the company’s HP BladeSystem c-Class servers. The HP NC542m provides full bandwidth on both ports simultaneously with low power at 8.5 watts maximum. The NC542m also supports low standard TCP/IP application latency at less than 8us and supports an internal RDMA acceleration engine to further reduce the latency to well under 6us.

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Unidesk gets $12 Million venture funding

Unidesk of Marlborough, Mass., announced Monday that it had received $12 million in Series B venture funding. Unidesk focuses on desktop virtualization software used to run multiple operating systems on the current generation of client platforms. Desktop virtualization, in which desktops are run on these same servers and accessed by a remote display and keyboard instead of a personal computer or a laptop, is projected by many to be the next big thing in virtualization technology, according to Unidesk.

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Oracle acquisition of Sun approved by European Commission

Oracle announced on Thursday that it had received unconditional regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Oracle expects unconditional approval from China and Russia and intends to close the transaction shortly. Oracle will host an all-day live event for customers, partners, press and analysts on January 27th, 2010 at 9:00 AM Pacific time, at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Details are available at: www.oracle.com/sun

VKernel releases Optimization Pack 1.2

VKernal Wednesday announced release 1.2 of its Optimization Pack, to manage VM sprawl, re-size virtual machines (VMs) to improve performance and increase the number of VMs on existing hardware and reclaim storage wasted on abandoned VMs, templates and snapshots. Optimization Pack 1.2 includes the new VM Stats applet, which provides key summary statistics, benchmarks virtualization efficiency against industry averages and highlights savings achievable by correctly sizing VMs and eliminating wasted storage.

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5nine Software releases Hyper-V migration solution

5nine Software Wednesday announced the release of 5nine Migrator for Hyper-V, software designed for enterprises and small to medium businesses’ physical to virtual deployment with Hyper-V. Migrator includes functions for migration analysis and planning, automatic physical to virtual conversion and ongoing workload optimization and capacity planning. Other features include automatic provisioning of virtual machines, hardware pre-processing and migration process monitoring.

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International Computerware introduces the vCube

International Computerware announced on Wednesday the introduction of the vCube, a datacenter solution that combines servers, switches, unified storage, virtualization, monitoring, information protection and other modular components from multiple partner sources. Based on an assessment, HP, Dell or Cisco servers and Brocade or Cisco switches can be incorporated.

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VMware expands VMware vCloud developer platform

VMware on Wednesday announced the availability of both Java and Python open-source software development kits (SDKs) for the VMware vCloud API. Python and Java SDKs for the VMware vCloud API will accelerate developers’ ability to leverage VMware vCloud services. VMware partners Cloudera and webappVM also announced new solutions for VMware vCloud Express developed with the VMware vCloud API and the SDKs. Open-source client libraries and tools for the VMware vCloud API are now available from standard cloud software resources including Dasein, jclouds and libcloud.

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IEEE launches Smart Grid web portal

IEEE on Tuesday launched a web portal dedicated to intelligence related to Smart Grid technology. With over 100 standards published or in development specific to Smart Grid, IEEE is in a position to provide information critical to manufacturers, policymakers, educators, academics, governments, engineers, computer scientists, researchers and other stakeholders in the power and energy, information technology (IT) and communication industries.

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Gartner CIO survey predicts flat spending for 2010

Gartner on Tuesday released the results of its 2010 CIO survey which shows that budgets are expected to be 1.3% higher in 2010 than in 2009, when budgets were slashed by 8.1%. The survey includes responses from 1,586 CIOs representing more than $126 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 41 countries and 27 industries. Top technology priority for 2010 will be virtualization, followed by cloud computing and Web 2.0. Top business priority is business process improvement followed by reducing enterprise costs and increasing use of analytics.

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Intel plans Westmere release during Q1

During its quarterly earnings call Thursday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that new Xeon server processors, based on the Westmere architecture, would be released during the current calendar quarter. Using a 32 nanometer process, Intel will refresh its line of Xeon multi-core server processors. Based on the Nehalem design, Westmere will have better performance and power consumption characteristics due to the higher density gained from the manufacturing process.

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HP and Microsoft to invest $250 million for product integration

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft executives discussed a three-year agreement for a product development strategy to simplify technology deployments by their customers, in a Wednesday conference call. An ‘infrastructure-to-application’ model will result in packaged systems including servers, storage, networking and software, which sounds very similar to the EMC, Cisco and VMware vBLOCK product initiative. HP CEO Mark Hurd and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stressed that the collaboration had substantial mutual investment, far more than typical partnering agreements.

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VMware eases virtualization implementation for SMBs

VMware on Wednesday announced the availability of VMware Go, a web-based service that allows small or medium businesses (SMBs) to virtualize servers and create running virtual machines with just a few clicks of a mouse. By automating the installation of the VMware ESXi hypervisor, the new web service provides an easy process for the virtualization of applications. As many as 1,000 beta testers have created thousands of virtual systems, proving the service’s viability.

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Wyse has new client provisioning software

Wyse Technology on Wednesday introduced the availability of WSM 3.0 for provisioning thin clients. New features include faster application streaming and pre-fetching, high availability for distributed sites, full Windows 7 functionality, operating system and application content distribution management and user setting and data preservation. WSM 3.0 supports Microsoft Server 2003, 2008 or XP Professional, or a Wyse WSM Appliance Device. Users are also able to create and provision their virtual clients with VMware Virtual Center Integration. Pricing is $200 per device seat.

VMware to acquire Zimbra

VMware announced Tuesday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a vendor of e-mail and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc. Financial aspects of the deal were not disclosed. Zimbra is an open source e-mail and collaboration solution with over 55 million mailboxes. As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small- and medium-sized business customers.

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Raritan has encrypted version of KVM switch

Raritan on Monday launched a keyboard video mouse (KVM) switch with an embedded Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 certified encryption module, providing KVM-over-IP security. The Cryptographic Module used by the Dominion KX II has been validated by the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) for FIPS 140-2 Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, and other FIPS cryptography-based standards. The FIPS 140-2 Cryptographic Module is available on all Dominion KX II enterprise models with Release 2.2 firmware.

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APC and IBM partner on shipping container data center

APC by Schneider Electric on Monday announced an expanded relationship with IBM to offer an IBM Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) container version based on APC's InfraStruxure architecture and IBM's global services capabilities. The PMDC provides a fully functional data center in a shipping container with a complete physical infrastructure including power and cooling systems and remote monitoring. APC technologies are used for power, cooling, racks and enterprise management software.

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CDW virtualization survey finds high level of deployment

CDW Monday released the results of its Server Virtualization Life Cycle Report examining the maturity of the server virtualization market. The survey involved 387 IT executives in organizations with 100 employees or more. 90% of businesses reported implementation of server virtualization at some level. 54% percent indicated that they have completed their deployment. The most-cited barriers to further adoption of server virtualization were security concerns and the compatibility of current hardware or critical software applications with virtualization platforms.

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Cisco selects Avnet for unified computing distribution

Shortly before the Holidays, Avnet announced that it would be distributing Cisco’s data center products in the US and Canada. In addition to the Unified Computing System (UCS) Blade and Rack servers (models B and C), the agreement includes the Application Control Engine and WAN Optimization. The Nexus data center family of switches, MDS family of fiber channel switches and Catalyst e-blade switches will also be distributed by Avnet under the agreement.