Altor Networks, a 14-month-old start-up backed by $6 million in funding from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, says the kind of security used on physical machines flat-out doesn't work in the virtual world and that you've got to think of virtualized machines as a network unto itself. Altor's thinking that way and claims to be able to make a virtual environment more secure than a physical one by putting the security at the network level, specifically on the virtual (software) switch.

As a technology provider that helps application companies embrace cloud computing by virtualizing the applications to run on any cloud, I was a bit disappointed with Google's appengine announcement. It appears that Google is embracing the 'walled garden' approach of salesforce.com and Microsoft instead of the cloud approach of Amazon.

Brocade announced a series of data center fabric switches and server HBAs that deliver a new level of end-to-end data center networking performance. In addition, the Company announced advanced networking capabilities across both switches and HBAs that simplifies the end-to-end management of server and storage environments, including data migration and data security, in data centers.

Storage virtualization introduces a level of abstraction that sits between application servers and physical storage resources to provide centralized volume management and non-disruptive data mobility. These capabilities help storage managers improve productivity, capacity-utilization and service levels. Its unique position between application servers and storage resources demands the highest levels of availability, performance and data integrity. This session will review the benefits of virtualization and how it improves productivity, capacity utilization and service levels. It will also discuss how second generation, network based storage virtualization can be used to meet the demands imposed by its central position in the I/O stack.

It's no secret that data centers are faced with exponential storage growth, increasing operational costs, power and cooling limitations, and the need to provision and bring new applications online more rapidly to support critical business needs, many customers look to virtualization strategies to ease the management burden. SRM technology can address the demands and management complexities that virtualization presents. Virtualization, by definition, can apply to operating systems, applications and storage arrays. This session will identify and elaborate on the various virtualization categories, and talk about how SRM technology can enable IT organizations to manage storage in the virtual enterprise.

VaST announced that Seiko Epson ('Epson') has selected VaST's CoMET as the development tool for printer product design. Epson's extensive evaluation of CoMET showed it was easy to use and improved software development productivity. CoMET combines high-speed, and cycle-accurate virtualization technology in a platform development environment that accelerates electronic systems development.

VaST announced the promotion of Jason Niatas as vice president of North America sales. Niatas joined VaST in 2006 as director of sales and in his new position will expand his responsibility to all of North America. Niatas was responsible for growing and strengthening VaST's relationship with key US based automotive OEMs and Tier 1s as well as forming strong partnerships at North American semiconductor companies.

As virtualization becomes more widely deployed, and enterprises look for new ways to leverage this revolutionary technology, the consumption and delivery of this technology is changing. It is no longer one-size-fits-all and confined to a specific area of the data center, but instead is proliferating within the data center and out to the user via the desktop and applications. This session will provide IT organizations with a short - and long - term roadmap by focusing on the new delivery models for virtualization (including embedded hypervisors and managed services), what's available today and what can be expected in the future, and best practices for deployment.

Virtual Cloud Computing represents the next wave of virtualization and offers significant market opportunities by providing a new, simpler, and much more pervasive platform for on-demand, desktop and application service delivery. While server-side virtualization helps enterprises optimize data center resources, the use of a universal dialtone technology offers a significantly larger market for desktop users in both commercial and consumer segments. The key to virtual cloud computing is in the universal dialtone which securely links users to desktop applications and content resources, on demand, via any device.

DataCore Software announced that its two storage virtualization solutions, SANsymphony and SANmelody, have been verified as Citrix Ready for XenServer 4.1 as virtual SAN appliances running on XenServer virtual machines as well as in a standard physical storage server configuration. Rigorous testing verified that both implementations will support XenServer 4.1 virtual machines with virtual storage and advanced storage services critical to demanding virtual server environments, such as fail-safe data protection, high availability mirroring, disaster recovery replication, SANmotion data migration, thin provisioning storage pools and high speed caching for performance acceleration.

I/O is a key element of server architecture, but its virtualization is only now starting to be addressed. Without I/O virtualization, the amount, type and physical connectivity of server I/O are all fixed. In order to achieve true flexibility in server usage, these fixed resources must become dynamic. This enables an on-demand usage model for non-virtualized servers, including failover with shared spares, and server pool scaling. It is also an important complement to virtual machine technology, providing flexible dedicated I/O pipes for virtual machines. This presentation will compare different approaches to I/O virtualization and discuss the applications of the technology.

NextIO announced the ExpressConnect family of products. ExpressConnect is a family of ioGateway products for the virtualization market. The ExpressConnect are end-to-end connectivity solutions that leverage industry standard PCI Express (PCIe) technology. The ioGateway segment of the virtualization market is defined as products enabling seamless IO Virtualization (IOV) to all standard industry endpoints (or devices) using industry-standard drivers residing in either rack or blade form factors. The segment encompasses both expansion and sharing opportunities.

Insight Integrated Systems (IIS) will showcase NetApp's server virtualization solutions. Virtualization is a technique for increasing server utilization by supporting multiple operating systems running on a single server. It provides an abstraction layer that decouples the server's physical hardware from the operating system, creating a uniform pool of computer resources that can be allocated to virtual servers in a controlled manner.

Virtualization is the future of IT management, but what exactly does that mean to your organization? CIOs around the world recognize that virtualization could be the answer to combating skyrocketing costs associated with managing their IT infrastructure; however, many are still left wondering how to implement a long-term, sustainable virtualization strategy. In this session, BMC Software CTO, Tom Bishop, will explain how IT organizations can realize the full value of virtualization through aligning IT with business priorities and automating IT processes.

The need for a way to more effectively manage and reduce the complexity of end points has never been greater. While virtualization technologies offer a breakthrough approach to reduce the complexities of managing end points, there are different ways organizations are leveraging this technology. This session discusses the distinct differences between how organizations are approaching virtualizing end points and the benefits each implementation offers for gaining the performance, security and control needed to manage end points for today's dispersed organizations.

Alternative Technology announced an agreement to distribute Marathon Technologies everRun fault-tolerant, high availability software for physical and virtual server environments. Marathon's everRun software is for IT professionals at midsize companies and enterprises who want to prevent outages and data loss in their physical and virtual infrastructures. everRun provides fault-tolerant, high availability for Citrix XenServer and Windows Server 2003 to deliver uninterrupted availability, data protection, and rapid recovery through a 'one-click' operation.

Businesses that virtualize can increase efficiency and reduce costs by eliminating low- performance/low-efficienc y servers. Less well-known, but equally important, is the parallel advantage of streamlining the legacy power and cooling systems that support virtualized environments. This presentation will discuss how new power and cooling technologies and effective data center planning and design are saving additional electrical costs, sometimes even more than the original savings from virtualization. Learn how to help manage the complexities of a virtualized environment by answering the not-so-obvious questions 'Where should I locate my next server?' and 'Where should I migrate my applications to maximize efficiency?'

F5 Networks announced that it has launched the File Virtualization For Dummies program with Wiley Publishing that offers the For Dummies guide along with a supporting webinar. Keeping in line with Wiley's For Dummies guides, this program offers a pragmatic approach to a pervasive issue. The guide and webinar outline the problems created by today's storage deployments, along with the information that IT staff needs to help manage and solve the associated problems. The overall goal of the program is to help enterprise IT staff get a grip on storage growth and reduce costs.

In keeping with Dell's mission to simplify IT, Dell announced the seamless integration of Dell EqualLogic storage arrays with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which automates disaster recovery (DR) management in virtual infrastructures. As one of VMware's largest resellers and Global Technology Alliance Partners, Dell and its network of Enterprise- Architecture-certified channel partners can now deliver a complete end-to-end DR automation and management solution. The combined Dell EqualLogic/VMware solution integrates PS Series Auto-Replication directly into SRM using PS Series SRM Storage Adapter software developed by Dell.

Citrix says that Dell has started pre-installing XenServer on PowerEdge servers at the factory for worldwide distribution. It said XenServer Dell products are the only virtualization solutions to integrate Dell's OpenManage agent technology, which is supposed to make customer feel comfortable.

Virtualization is quickly becoming a staple technology for enterprise IT. The theme of this November's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo is 'The Next Generation of Virtualization.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

AMD has rethought its roadmap and, given its limited resources and near-death experience with Barcelona, it's scrubbing Montreal, the eight-core chip that was supposed to follow Shanghai, the chip after Barcelona, and substituting a six-core part code named Istanbul to be followed by a 12-core part called Magny-Cours. Speculation has also been rife this week that AMD would finally tease out its so-called asset-lite manufacturing plans, some kind of cost-saving outsourcing scheme, at its shareholders meeting Thursday, chatter that has flamed into speculation that it will break in two - a manufacturing business and a chip design and development operation.

VMware announced two new bundles of its suite of management and automation products for the datacenter. The VMware IT Service Delivery Bundle includes all the products necessary to automate the entire lifecycle of IT services from initial request to final retirement: VMware Lifecycle Manager and either VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. These products use virtualization to provide a way to manage the entire software lifecycle.

EMC announced it will offer the broadest technology support for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a new product in the VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) portfolio that automates and accelerates the recovery of virtual machines in the event of a disaster in a VMware VI3 environment. This product, when deployed in conjunction with EMC's portfolio of replication software, will enable customers to bring their virtualized servers and mission critical information online at a secondary site.

With cloud computing becoming ever more prevalent in the consumer space for rapidly scaling Web 2.0 applications, grid computing finally delivers similarly efficient scalability to the business world. Grid computing is an impressive, confident, powerful technology model, winning high-profile admirers as it approaches full maturity.

VMware announced that VMware Site Recovery Manager, a pioneering product for disaster recovery management and automation, will be available for order next week with general availability expected to follow within 30 days. VMware Site Recovery Manager, which is part of VMware's suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be this close to buying Electronic Data Systems for somewhere in the heady neighborhood of $12 billion-$13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, a pretty premium over its $9.5 billion market cap Friday. The paper thinks there could be an announcement on Tuesday. Buying the consultant is meant to help HP compete on the services side against rival IBM.

SAS unveiled a new solution based on VMware virtualization to monitor, manage and optimize IT operations across all physical and virtual environments. SAS IT Intelligence for VMware Infrastructure will enable customers to better align IT resources with strategic business goals.

Currently, an overwhelming majority of organizations are migrating and consolidating servers from physical to virtual environments. While the savings of the virtualized data center are extremely compelling, there is a new set of challenges that IT staffs didn't have to deal with in the physical world. One of the challenges is getting used to the fact that all hardware resources: CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization are shared between virtual machines. This means that applications and users can impact each other and therefore resource monitoring becomes extremely important. If you don?t closely monitor resource consumption by each virtual machine and simply keep adding more virtual machines without doing analysis on how this will impact all four core resources, the result will be bad performance and even system downtime. Ultimately, this means unhappy users, dissatisfied managers, and a negative impact on the virtualization project. So, you need to find a way to prevent this problem.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit en banc heard oral arguments Thursday in the Bilski case, which, if their honors get to feeling radical and rule broadly, could outlaw not only business methods patents in the United States but - by extension - void all existing software patents and patent applications. It could take the court maybe nine months and into a new administration to decide.

StoneFly announced its entry into VMware's Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) and Hardware Certification Programs. In addition, StoneFly announced that the StoneFly StoneFusion6.X operating system now offers enhanced support for virtual server environments, including the latest versions of VMware ESX. As StoneFly's Intelligent Network Storage Platform, StoneFusion comes standard with each StoneFly IP SAN and offers comprehensive storage services, including built-in support for the VMware iSCSI initiator for speedy integration of networked storage with virtual servers.

SYS-CON Events has announced that VMware CTO Stephen Herrod is to give the Morning Keynote on June 24 at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held June 23-24, 2008, in New York City. Herrod will be taking a 35,000 foot view of the fast-expanding virtualization space, and the lasting role that software that creates and manages virtual machines is now destined to play in the Enterprise IT landscape.

Virtualization is a strategic initiative at Dell and so we have spent considerable time planning and seeking the requirements of hundreds of our customers of all types and sizes and across many geographies. What we found was pretty revealing, although not particularly surprising: virtualization has matured to the point where it is not just viewed as a red-hot, 'solve everything' technology, but as an effective means for our customers to meet specific business needs and objectives.

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, AMD has not added anything new to its antitrust charges against Intel - just some color - mostly black redactions - even after riffling through the 145 million pages of discovery that Intel turned over to it. According to AMD, 'Intel has made sure that the written record tells little of the story.' The case has now reached the deposition stage and what's new this week is the revelation that AMD wants the right to take 48 times more depositions than the federal standard allows.

HP is racing to the rescue of those threatening to drown in their own data, but that Web 2.0 lot had better be able to hold on until the fourth quarter when HP can deliver what it calls 'Extreme' storage, the NAS-style ExDS9100. It's a 10U BladeSystem that can hold 820TB of SATA-based data and through the wonders of HP's PolyServe clustering can be strung together into a multi-petabyte system - along the lines of what EMC is promising to do with Hulk and Maui widgetry - that can be managed by a single administrator.

When it comes to defining the role of virtualization, there are two camps: 1) Virtualization is a platform - represented by VMware; 2) Virtualization is a feature - represented by Parallels, Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, SUN, Novell, Oracle.

ScaleMP announced details of its channel partner program. The program, designed to assist channel partners in providing server solutions for their customers' high-end computing needs, offers resellers and system integrators the necessary tools to bring the recently launched ScaleMP vSMP Foundation Standalone to their customer base. vSMP Foundation Standalone is based on the Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture, which aggregates two dual-socket industry-standard x86 servers into a powerful four-socket shared memory system.

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

A new scalable virtualization server is now available from Dell and based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, AMD announced. Enterprise customers interested in consolidating server infrastructure may turn to two new virtualization servers from Dell utilizing Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, including the Dell PowerEdge R905 which set a new standard in VMmark performance testing with 60 virtual machines. The new Dell servers take advantage of AMD Direct Connect Architecture to reduce bottlenecks, minimize latency and increase the performance of virtualized applications to maximize the benefits of virtualization.