Virtualisation

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week.

Red Hat has launched a new partner program to make sure its enterprise Linux and JBoss software are core components of a cloud-computing infrastructure, and to guarantee that Red Hat-based applications will run reliably and safely in the cloud.

For developers, Oracle's Fusion Middleware 11g rollout on Wednesday emphasizes Java technologies, particularly the company's JDeveloper IDE, along with concepts including declarative programming and ALM (application lifecycle management).

Oracle unveiled a major chunk of Fusion Middleware 11g, the foundation for its next-generation Fusion Applications, during an event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Grid vendor Platform Computing has unveiled new private cloud software that aggregates servers, storage, networking tools and hypervisors to create a shared pool of physical and virtual resources.

Wherever you turn, someone's ready to tell (or sell) you something related to cloud computing. Cutting through the myths is essential to deciding whether, when, and how the cloud is right for you. Here's our top list of myths; we welcome your suggestions and feedback in our cloud myths discussion area**URL TK**:

Successful server virtualization deployments lead many IT managers to believe desktop virtualization would provide the same benefits. While that is partly true, companies need to be aware of how the two technologies differ, industry experts caution.

Network thoroughbred Cisco jumps into the blade server market. Server stallion HP adds security blades to its ProCurve switches. IBM teams up with Brocade. Oracle buys Sun. And everybody courts that prize filly VMware.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

VMware’s product roadmap and strategic vision is changing rapidly. What can we expect to see from a channel perspective going forward?

McAfee is hunkering down to integrate the security technologies it has bought over the past several months into its varied line of security software and appliances. Two trends in the company's activities are developing parallel products for deployment as software on endpoints and as network-based appliances. This week, for instance, the company is announcing that NAC software can be installed on its IntruShield IPS appliance to give customers the option of enforcing NAC policies in the network, not just on the endpoint. The company is bringing management of these platforms under control of its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in an effort to centralize control of network security. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene spoke with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt about these efforts as well as other issues facing the company.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.

Although it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider?

Cloud computing is at its peak of hype. In fact, it's probably about to jump the shark. Savvy enterprise IT managers know there's little reason to embrace cloud this early in its development.

Gartner released its annual "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009" and pride of place goes to virtualization, put right at the top of the list. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Gartner placed Cloud Computing directly below virtualization in the second spot.

NComputing X550 Desktop

On Tuesday, Microsoft released to manufacturing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The final code will be shipped on November 1. The company bills the software as one-stop organization, allowing administrators to set up and deploy new virtual machines and manage hosts and other virtual infrastructure elements from one console.

When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.

Both hypervisors we tested have requirements for the hardware they can run on and the virtual machines they can support.