Stories by: Joanne Cummings

Virtualization stalwarts and start-ups alike are aiming for the desktop. A baker's dozen.

1. Take a SWAT team approach

The scenario is typical: The lights on the network management consoles are a soothing shade of green, but a top revenue-generating application is crawling. Business users have swamped the help desk with calls and trouble tickets. Everyone there is calling the network team to figure out the problem.

Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a US law firm, knows what competing against the big guys is like. Although it has just 135 lawyers and 400 employees overall, its client list includes such heavyweights as Citigroup, Google, HP, the Oakland Raiders football team and Sony Online Entertainment.

US-based Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin found that moving away from tape toward continuous data protection let it cut costs and provide more reliable backup and recovery. Here are some lessons the law firm learned along the way:

Say goodbye to the tower.

Metro Health Hospital, a healthcare system serving 130,000 patients across Michigan, is already using what some consider the desktop of the future. The hospital has rolled out server-hosted virtual desktops to every employee no matter where they are or what client device they use.

Aviall Services, a Dallas-based Boeing subsidiary and provider of after-market supply-chain management services for the aerospace, defense and marine industries, successfully implemented a new storage scheme that doubles its storage capacity, increases performance and prepares it for future services.

Like other public companies that handle credit cards, TiVo faces a double whammy: meeting the requirements of the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the Payment Card Industry data security standard. Through a savvy combination of proactive auditor relations, automation and simplification, however, the company has cut significantly the time and effort it spends dealing with compliance issues.

Everybody knows virtualization isn't just about VMware anymore. Many users are past the rush to server virtualization and now need to increase the benefits of the move. They need not only to improve efficiency, performance and management, but also to find ways to extend the technology to their desktop, storage and mobile environments. That's a heavy burden. Product choices can be overwhelming, and a starting point difficult to find. Get on your way with promising products from these 10 companies:

Carriers building IP-based next-generation network infrastructures are faced with the tough task of guaranteeing service levels and uptime requirements in a huge, global, but less-than-deterministic network environment.