Virtualisation

The Bluetooth functionality of the Flame cyberespionage malware could potentially be used to pinpoint the physical location of infected devices and allow local attackers to extract data if they get in close proximity to the victims, according to security researchers from antivirus vendors Symantec and Kaspersky Lab.

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered the Stuxnet cyberattacks on Iran in an effort to slow the country's development of a nuclear program, according to a report in The New York Times.

While some online services are stepping up their efforts to protect private user data from government requests, there is plenty room for improvement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said on Thursday. It is time for all companies that hold private user data to make public commitments to defend their users against government overreach, the foundation said.

Legitimate browser functionality can be abused to trick users into believing that a trusted website has asked them to download a file, which is actually being served from a rogue server, Google security engineer Michal Zalewski demonstrated on Tuesday.

Salesforce.com's Desk.com service is about to add multilingual support to the cloud-based help-desk software, the company said Thursday.

The cloud 'security strategy' involves adopting security solutions that seamlessly span physical, virtual and private/hybrid/public cloud environments while simplifying operational and management complexities. Roundtable attendees got down to business, discussion the 'practical steps' and issues and opportunities involved in securing the cloud environment. Jennifer O'Brien reports.

The datacentre of the future is shaped by a number of forces including commoditisation, virtualisation, integration and innovation. A group of industry experts sat down to discuss the key factors shaping the evolution of the datacentre of the future and its impact on the channel.

Virtualisation is dominant in the enterprise market today, but how is it faring in the SMB space? ARN brought together a collection of channel players and vendors to discuss the opportunities and challenges for virtualisation technology in the smaller end of town.

ARN recently held a roundtable on selling virtualisation to SMBs. Attached are highlights from the recent event.

While the case for server virtualisation in the SMB market is intensifying, many partners around the table were less convinced about short-term take-up of desktop virtualisation.

IT as we know it is over.

In IT, failure is not an option. Not surprisingly, organizations have made it a high priority to develop and implement reliable business continuity plans to ensure that IT services are always available to internal users and outside customers.

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including Cloud computing, enterprise search, and mobile application development. (These are in addition to seven hot Cloud companies and seven storage companies to watch that we highlighted last year.)

Technology firms wowed us in 2011, delivering tablets, ultrathin laptops, innovative cloud services, and voice command digital assistants. Not so long ago, the technology underlying these products was nothing more than research and development projects. So, in an effort to peek into our not-so-distant tech future, here's a glimpse at ten promising projects percolating in tech research labs.

About a year ago, a few of the larger virtualization software vendors, such as VMware and CA Technologies, started campaigning against a phenomena that they called virtual stall.

Name: Harry Sverdlove

Name: Amichai Shulman

It has been about eight months since Michael Bosnar replaced Sean Walsh as AppSense A/NZ managing director. HAFIZAH OSMAN spoke to him about some of the challenges the company has faced and the company’s expansion strategies.

In March, Western Digital agreed to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies> (HGST), the disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd., in a stock and cash transaction valued at $US4.3 billion. HGST CEO Steve Milligan will join WD as president at the closing of the deal, expected in the fourth quarter.

VMware director of global partner strategy and operations, Douglas Smith, and local vice-president, Paul Harapin, were keynote speakers at the vendor’s recent A/NZ Partner Exchange. The pair caught up with NADIA CAMERON to discuss how it plans to strengthen the bond between the vendor and its channel base, as well as how competencies, acquisitions and vendor alliances are affecting the partner community.

Last year, IT budgets declined by 10 per cent to 20 per cent, depending on who you believe. Jobs were lost. And the pool of vendors is constantly shrinking, given the tsunami of bankruptcies and mergers over the past few years. (Adios, Nortel.)

The term "cloudbursting" was coined by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr to describe the use of cloud computing to deal with overflow requests, such as those that occur during seasonal rushes to online retail sites.

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?

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.

Ever since VMware coined the term, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has conjured images of large data centers, beefy servers, centralized storage, and complex software stacks. It's a given that each VDI installation requires numerous servers, software packages, and storage systems in order to provide desktop virtualization for more than a small handful of users, so VDI just has to be both expensive and complicated to deploy. Right?

The potential benefits of public clouds are obvious to most IT execs, but so are the pitfalls -- outages, security concerns, compliance issues, and questions about performance, management, service-level agreements and billing. At this point, it's fair to say that most IT execs are wary of entrusting sensitive data or important applications to the public cloud.

With virtualization taking over the computing world, enterprises everywhere are finding that virtual machines spread across an organization need to be managed as much as their physical computers are. Companies are also figuring out that these virtual machines have special needs and requirements that can multiply very quickly as servers are added, moved, changed or removed.

Revolutionary. Cutting edge. State of the art. These are words and phrases that are bandied around so very many products in the IT field that they become useless, bland, expected. The truth is that truly revolutionary products are few and far between. That said, Cisco's Unified Computing System fits the bill.

VMware vSphere 4, out today, is a big release, with plenty of new features and changes, but it's not your run-of-the-mill major update. The new features, which range from VM clustering to agentless VM backup, are especially significant in that they may mark the moment when virtualisation shifted from the effort to provide a stable replica of a traditional infrastructure to significantly enhancing the capabilities of a virtual environment.