ARN reporting: Security, virtualization lead 2009 tech plans

Posted on November 12, 2008 by FitzGerald

IT organizations consider security, server
virtualization and business-related technologies a top priority for
2009, according to research released by The Society for Information
Management.

SIM surveyed 300 member organizations in June
and learned that the top five application and technology developments
for the coming year include antivirus protection, business intelligence, business process management (BPM), continuity planning and disaster recovery, and server virtualization.

See the entire article here.

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VMware to Bring Virtualization to Mobile Phones, Enabling a Host of Benefits for Handset Vendors, Corporations and Mobile Phone Users

Posted on November 10, 2008 by FitzGerald

VMware announced plans to
bring virtualization and its many proven benefits to mobile phones
through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Built on
innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in
October 2008, VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development
time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster.
In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple
profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on
the same phone.

“VMware is excited to extend the benefits of virtualization, which
we pioneered for x86 hardware, to the mobile phone market,” said Paul
Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “By
abstracting the applications and data from the hardware itself, we
expect that virtualization will not only enable handset vendors to
accelerate time to market but can also pave the way for innovative
applications and services for phone users. We look forward to working
closely with our partners to bring new mobile solutions to market
faster.”

“Gartner sees virtualization in the mobile space as a very promising
and potentially a fast emerging market,” said Monica Basso, research
vice president, at Gartner.  “We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of
new smart phones shipped will be virtualized (1).  Virtualization can
enable enterprises and consumers to easily manage and secure their
phones and it can also help handset vendors reduce bills of materials
and shorten development cycles to allow for faster releases.”

What is VMware MVP?
VMware MVP is a thin layer
of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the
applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be
optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and
memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset
vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to
manage. 

Benefits to Handset Manufacturers

  • Accelerated time to market:
    Today,
    handset vendors spend significant time and effort getting new phones to
    market due to the use of multiple chipsets, operating systems and
    device drivers across their product families. The same software stack
    does not work across all the phones and, therefore, must be ported
    separately for each platform. This process is slow and expensive and
    ultimately slows time to market. VMware MVP will virtualize the
    hardware, enabling handset vendors to develop a software stack with an
    operating system and a set of applications that is not tied to the
    underlying hardware. This will enable the vendors to deploy the same
    software stack on a wide variety of phones without worrying about the
    underlying hardware differences. At the same time, by isolating the
    device drivers from the operating system, handset vendors can further
    reduce porting costs because they can now use the same drivers
    irrespective of the operating system deployed on the phone.
  • Easy Migration to Rich Operating Systems:
    Increasingly,
    handset vendors and carriers are looking to migrate from proprietary
    operating systems to rich, open operating systems to enable their
    customers to access the widest selection of applications. With this
    transition to open operating systems, protection of trusted services
    such as digital rights management, authentication, billing, etc. is
    becoming an increasing concern. VMware MVP will allow vendors to
    isolate these important trusted services from the open operating system
    and run them in isolated and tamper-proof virtual machines so that even
    if the open environment is compromised, the trusted services are not
    impacted.

Benefits to Businesses and End Users

  • Multiple Profiles:
    Companies
    are under increasing pressure from employees to support employee-owned
    mobile devices. Choice, however, brings with it complexity in managing
    a wide variety of devices in terms of both cost and security. It also
    brings increased risk in securing and managing employee-owned devices,
    especially if they contain confidential information. VMware MVP will
    allow IT organizations to deploy a corporate phone personality that can
    run alongside the employee’s personal phone on the same physical device.
  • Persona on the Go:
    Smart
    phones are quickly becoming a combination of a PC and a wallet rolled
    into one package. A person’s phone persona – an individuals’ collection
    of applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit
    card information, PIM, etc. – is becoming much richer and more
    valuable. Consequently, the ability to protect and migrate personas
    will become an important purchasing decision. VMware MVP will save the
    persona as a set of files so that all the applications and data on the
    phone can be managed as a collection of files. People can then easily
    move their persona to a new device making the upgrade to a new phone
    virtually painless.

Visit www.vmware.com/mobile for additional information about VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform

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Reflex Security renamed to Reflex Systems

Posted on November 5, 2008 by FitzGerald

Since joining Reflex just a few short months ago, we have launched a new product which will revolutionize how virtual data centers are managed. Reflex’s Virtualization Management Center (VMC) delivers the visibility, management and security software necessary to see, understand and control increasingly complex virtual environments. The solution not only won Gold as top pick in the Security and Virtualization category for VMworld’s Best of VMworld awards but our solution also won overall ‘VMworld2008 Best of Show’ among nearly 300 exhibitors.

Reflex believes that security and management are inseparable. Reflex VMC is a software solution which bridges the gap between security and management in the virtual data center by providing an integrated solution which combines discovery & mapping, visualization, change control, configuration management, application monitoring, network security, performance monitoring, lifecycle management, etc. all together into a single management interface, making Reflex VMC unique.

While we have expanded our offering to solve the larger challenge of managing virtual infrastructure by adding robust discovery, visibility, and detailed topology views, we’ve not lost sight of the award-winning security features that made us an industry leader.  We firmly believe that these two capabilities go hand in hand, as you can’t secure what you can’t see.  Winning best security and virtualization product at VM World was because of our security capabilities.  Winning “best of show” was because of how we integrate security and management together.

The additional management features in our solution have become so significant that they have increasingly become a winning asset in our sales and marketing efforts.  It is for this reason that we are excited to announce that we are renaming Reflex Security to Reflex Systems effective immediately. This transition further reinforces Reflex’s focus and success in providing essential virtualization management and security solutions to answer customer demand.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue to keep you updated with latest news and updates from Reflex Systems, in the meantime let us know if we can assist you with anything to help drive business.

Thank you,

Pete Privateer

President & CEO

Reflex Systems, Inc.

www.reflexsystems.com

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Healthcare IT news: The Role of Virtualization in Healthcare

Posted on November 5, 2008 by FitzGerald

The healthcare industry faces many challenges in embracing innovation in today’s environment of governance and regulatory compliance. The alternatives in access have become as varied as the requirements. Healthcare continues to seek greater security while at the same time enhancing the end user (and ultimately the patient) experience.

In this on-demand Web seminar, the role that virtualization can play will be discussed. In a short introduction, the rigor of user segmentation (aligning the end user requirements to the work to be performed) will be applied to the various alternative for virtualization.

After these topics are presented, HP’s two healthcare customers will explain how they used virtualization technology to solve their real healthcare business problems:

Attend this on-demand Web seminar to learn how you can:

  • Enable HIPAA Compliances and keep data secure.
  • Improve your lifecycle of desktops and management

Click here for viewing!

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NetApp Bolsters Midrange Storage Offering With New FAS3160 and V3160

Posted on November 4, 2008 by FitzGerald

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced the addition of the FAS3160 and V3160, strengthening its current series of midrange storage offerings for customers. As part of today’s news, NetApp unveiled its plans to enable 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) support and provide enterprise flash Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage and flash-based caching modules for its FAS and V-Series products, helping customers to further enhance their data center infrastructures through improved performance, lower cost, and increased efficiencies.

The FAS3160 joins the FAS3140 and FAS3170 models, offering customers improved price/performance, flexibility, and scalability over other midrange storage systems. The NetApp® FAS3100 series of storage systems offers customers a single unified storage architecture to meet their needs and a common suite of application-aware software and management tools that are part of the Data ONTAP® operating system. In addition, with features such as thin provisioning, deduplication, RAID-DP®, and FlexClone®, customers can boost storage efficiency and performance without breaking the bank. The NetApp V3160 provides customers additional flexibility to meet their diverse and changing business needs by extending the features and capabilities of Data ONTAP, including deduplication, to disk arrays from other storage vendors, such as EMC and HP.

“We needed a storage solution for our virtual server hosting service to help address the challenging nature of providing data management solutions to our enterprise client base at an overall cost point that could make the model sustainable,” said Matt Stein, VP of Network Services, Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc., a NetApp FAS3100 customer. “NetApp provided us with the performance and capacity desired while also delivering increased efficiencies and flexibility through features like deduplication and thin provisioning. Combined with our VMware® solution, Primus is able to provide a high level of service to a broader base of our clientele with pricing that is competitive in the Canadian marketplace.”

8Gb FC Support Enables Customers to Better Meet Virtualization Demands

NetApp will expand its industry-leading support of 8Gb FC SAN solutions for all NetApp FAS and V-Series storage systems to deliver additional value and performance. Customers can now augment their virtualized data centers by addressing their server virtualization demands on storage networks while improving investment protection. Customers who upgrade to an 8Gb SAN can achieve higher performance and cost efficiencies because of shortened recovery times, increased productivity, faster data access, and increased throughput for virtualized servers. Also, the addition of an 8Gb target host bus adapter will enable FAS and V-Series customers to easily upgrade systems with no additional training.

“As more customers move to virtualized data centers, their networking and storage requirements become more pronounced,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, VP and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group at Cisco. “With the new Cisco 8Gbps line cards for the Cisco MDS 9500 Series within NetApp’s SAN switching portfolio, customers gain better end-to-end performance, scalability, and manageability in their virtualized data centers, while at the same time fully preserving their existing investment in their SAN infrastructure.”

NetApp Storage Systems Will Be Flash Ready

NetApp also unveiled today that the new FAS3160, V3160, and other FAS and V-Series storage systems will be enterprise flash ready. As part of its innovative strategy, NetApp will combine flash memory with its unified storage architecture to meet the performance needs of both leading-edge and mainstream IT professionals. Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp will give customers practical options by using flash memory both as persistent storage and also for caching purposes. Leveraging flash memory as a modular read cache in the storage controller enables customers to have a cost-effective way to optimize performance for common enterprise applications. Furthermore, NetApp’s unified storage architecture expands on the benefits of flash memory by multiplying customer savings of power, cooling, and space through the use of deduplication and other storage efficiency features.

New Integrated Suite of eSupport Tools Provides End-to-End Support

New next-generation support automation tools provide customers with additional ease of use and complete end-to-end support for all FAS and V-Series systems. This integrated support toolset combines NetApp AutoSupport, NetApp Premium AutoSupport, and the NetApp Remote Support Diagnostics Tool to provide customers with high levels of storage availability and performance.

NetApp AutoSupport is recognized as the industry’s leading “call home” tool and a built-in system monitoring capability available to all NetApp customers at no additional charge. By monitoring hundreds of system parameters with the ability to, in most cases, resolve issues without customer intervention, NetApp AutoSupport catches small issues before they become bigger problems that can negatively impact customer applications. Premium AutoSupport complements the baseline AutoSupport capability by providing the customer with the capability to do storage configuration management, autogenerated software upgrade plans, trend analysis, and performance trending. The NetApp Remote Support Diagnostics Tool provides faster remote 24×7 diagnostics and case resolution by NetApp Technical Support, resulting in reduced customer involvement in diagnostics and troubleshooting.

“NetApp has created support automation tools that help ensure its support infrastructure meets the needs of mission-critical enterprise environments,” said Matt Healey, research manager, IDC Software and Hardware Support Services. “With new product and technologies, customers now more than ever require support that is 24×7, includes minimal customer intervention, provides rapid response and resolution, and is highly secure. NetApp is addressing these needs with the new eSupport suite.”

To learn more about these industry-leading tools that differentiate NetApp support, visit http://www.netapp.com/us/support/esupport.html.

“Data center customers are looking for ways to reduce their costs, increase efficiencies, and boost performance,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing, NetApp. “Our flash roadmap and expanded 8Gb FC support are two key components that deliver these benefits to customers. With our unique approach to flash storage, customers will not only experience streamlined management and increased performance, but will do so while reducing their power, cooling, and space needs. At the same time, 8Gb FC support enables customers to fully utilize their virtualized environments in order to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and increased production associated with this architecture.”

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