Univa UD announced it has named industry veterans Alex Brown and Kent Purdy to lead its data center automation business division and retool its product suite. The announcement comes as Univa UD officially launches Reliance as its cornerstone product for service-based management of application delivery environments.

Red Hat announced advancements that extend the Company's Linux Automation strategy by providing expanded capabilities and incorporating broadened community involvement for secure management of both users and systems across virtual and physical enterprise infrastructures.

VMware has cut an OEM deal with Inspur, the Chinese company whose name used to be Langchao and said to be the largest native server maker. Inspur will bundle and support VMware's Infrastructure 3 widgetry on its servers. Inspur says there's little virtualization deployment experience in China.

Layered Technologies announced their second major product release this June. Working in direct conjunction with Microsoft, Layered Technologies launched Hyper-V. Hyper-V, previously codenamed Viridian, is a hypervisor-based technology that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008, and allows virtualization of multiple operating systems (including Windows and Linux) all on the same server. It provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available virtualization platform.

Akorri announced that Vancouver Coastal Health has implemented its flagship BalancePoint management solution to ensure success of the company's data center virtualization and consolidation efforts. Using BalancePoint, Vancouver Coastal Health was able to continually increase the density of its data center while improving storage utilization and maintaining optimal service levels.

Configuresoft announced its expanded partner program designed to maximize customer satisfaction and provide a more seamless relationship between Configuresoft and its partners. Enterprises are challenged with reducing costs, meeting compliance demands and managing additional complexity introduced by technologies such as virtualization and SOA, Configuresoft partners are experiencing increased demand for best-of-breed solutions such as Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM).

Chelsio Communications announced that its single- and dual-port 10GbE adapters are now certified for the VMware ESX hypervisor and have been added to the VMware ESX 3.5 Hardware Compatibility List. With this certification, Chelsio offers VMware customers low-latency adapters for high-performance computing in virtualized environments. This is another important step toward Chelsio's goal to enable unified wire networking for the agile data center by providing simple, standards-based solutions.

VMware's Board of Directors announced that it has made a change in the leadership of the company with the departure of Diane Greene as President and CEO. VMware's Board of Directors has appointed Paul Maritz as President and CEO of VMware effective immediately. Maritz was also named to VMware's Board of Directors.

In a series of reports released in March, Editor Paul McWilliams advised readers it was time to buy specific tech stocks. All of his selections went up with some nearly doubling. Realizing the highs we were seeing in mid-May were unlikely to hold, McWilliams released a special report as the markets were peaking that month suggesting to his readers it was time to take some profits or at least hedge long positions with covered calls.

Peak 10 has been chosen by Apogee Global Resources to support its enterprise-class delivery services. The company will receive a fully-managed virtual environment out of Peak 10's state-of-the-art Jacksonville facility. Apogee is relocating its headquarters from Columbia, S.C. to Jacksonville, Fla., which involves a merging of all company data and the consolidation of its division Web sites to the Peak 10 data center. Peak 10 will facilitate the company's data management and consolidation by providing Apogee with virtualization services as well as regular back-ups and network security to ensure data protection.

According to recent research from IDC, the pace of adoption of virtualized servers is incredibly rapid among organizations that are using virtualization, with 35% of servers purchased in 2007 being virtualized and 52% of those bought in 2008 expected to be so. 54% of those not using virtualization expect to do so in the next 18 months. While both large companies and smaller organizations are seeing virtualization as being key to their datacenter strategy, their next challenge will be to make more effective use of this capability.

SIMtone Corporation announced the launch of SIMtone International, the company?s newly established International headquarters in Switzerland. Addressing the growing market demand for ?carrier-grade? virtual services, SIMtone International is already working with many leading International Telecom and Cable Service Providers to deliver all types of carrier-grade virtual computing services for the enterprise, SMB and consumer markets.

DynamicOps, a venture-funded spinout of Credit Suisse, will present a Web conference on July 15 at 1 pm EDT on virtualization experiences in 'Deploying the Dynamic Data Center.'

VMware announced that Campbell Clinic Orthopaedics (Campbell Clinic) has deployed VMware Infrastructure 3 to virtualize its mission-critical applications and create a flexible, easily administered virtual infrastructure. VMware offers enterprise-class functionality in deployment sizes that fit the needs of small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The Campbell Clinic is one of thousands of SMBs that utilize VMware's proven and reliable cost-effective solutions to optimize their existing IT investments. VMware provides the scalability and flexibility for customers to buy what they need today and evolve their virtualization solutions as their business needs grow.

As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this 'cloud' thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.

Web hosting company, Rackspace Managed Hosting's Mosso cloud division, has developed a new control panel including a new provisioning system for its flagship product, The Hosting Cloud.

As network switch latencies fall and the architecture for processor coherency migrates from a frontside bus to a coherent network, technology is driving towards the next generation of distributed processing, which extends a microprocessor's coherent interconnect onto a standard network, enabling efficient, high performance inter-processor communication for x86 systems over standard commodity switches. New MicroNetwork interconnect technologies are emerging, connecting Coherent HyperTransport over either Infiniband or Ethernet. These chips can support dual Coherent HyperTransport links and dual connections to either Infiniband or Ethernet. This innovative technology can enable dynamic, high performance distributed processing using shared memory, delivering unprecedented scalability and flexibility on commodity systems. This presentation will cover the technical and business trends that are driving processor advancements and enabling truly dynamic computing within the data center.

DreamFactory, a pioneer in cloud-based Web applications and development tools, announced the company will offer its entire DreamFactory Suite on the new Intuit QuickBase Development Platform. DreamFactory's project management and collaboration cloudware will soon be readily available to millions of businesses using Intuit software.

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don't agree on exactly what the term means. Mike Eaton, Founder and CEO of Cloudworks and Atticus Information Systems, will be giving a breakout session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

Virtual Foresight is a policy-based virtualization management product that delivers out-of-the box best practices for enforcing IT Operations and Security policies. Acting as a critical control point, Virtual Foresight ensures policy enforcement throughout the lifecycle of a virtual machine regardless of location or state.

MaximumASP announced the release of Hyper-V technology as part of their dedicated server line-up. MaximumASP was among a handful of hosting providers selected for the Hyper-V Go Live program and first to launch hosted betas for IIS 7/Windows Server 2008 dedicated servers.

BLADE Network Technologies announced that it has joined the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing computer power consumption by 50 percent by 2010. As a pioneer of energy-efficient data center networking, BLADE is recognized on AlwaysOn's GoingGreen 100 list of the world's foremost 'green' companies. BLADE views organizations such as the Climate Savers Computing Initiative as key to the energy-efficient data center of the future.

David C. Laurello, president and chief executive officer of Stratus Technologies, has been elected as chairman of the board of directors. Former chairman, Stephen C. Kiely, continues to serve the company as a member of the board.

LeftHand Networks announced that the company's Advantage Partner Program is growing at an accelerated rate, adding 145 new VARs to its global program since November 2007. At more than 425 partners worldwide, the program's strong growth is attributed to the expanding iSCSI SAN market and LeftHand Networks' focus on its channel partner business model worldwide.

After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people to wondering whether Intel, when it finally does upgrade, will go to the Vista-beholden Windows 7 or to Linux or the Mac, its newest hero. It also got other people to remembering that Intel exhibited the same resistance to XP when it was new. It took four years for XP to get 50% of the market.

Mike Eaton, the founder and CEO of Cloudworks, provides five tips for companies watching their bottom line in a tight economy to enhance the remote access for mobile professionals through cloud computing.

DataCore announced that Alchemy Plus is using DataCore's SANmelody solution to provide a hosted server virtualization farm environment for small businesses under a 'Pay as You Use' utility computing framework. Alchemy Plus' data center is located in Dingwall in the Scottish Highlands. David Massey, Chief Technology Officer at Alchemy Plus, noted, 'We wanted to bring the power and efficiencies of virtualization to smaller organizations that typically were only running a single server or a couple of servers at most. We knew in order to succeed that we would have to develop a model that was as cost effective as it was functionality rich, using the principles of utility computing ? a concept where the customer only pays for what is used.'

The President of EMC's Cloud Computing Division, Paul Maritz, has been made President & CEO of VMware, immediately replacing co-founder and virtualization pioneer Diane Greene. Here Virtualization Journal brings a round up of the early reactions from the virtualization blogosphere.

Valtira announced the availability of The Valtira Online Marketing Platform on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Valtira customers now have access to the most cost-effective, scalable, flexible infrastructure to power their web marketing solutions.

Mellanox Technologies and Galactic Computing announced that Mellanox's 20Gb/s InfiniBand adapters provide the low-latency, high-performance storage interconnect for Galactic Computing's line of VSTOR storage systems and gateways, providing an adaptive and responsive infrastructure for business continuity and disaster recovery applications such as remote mirroring and replication. VSTOR supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI, InfiniBand, SAS and NAS connections to servers allowing total flexibility in access. Mellanox InfiniBand adapters serve as the ideal choice for workloads that require high performance, efficiency and scalability.

VKernel announced the appointment of Gene Fay as vice president of sales. In this role, Fay is responsible for VKernel's worldwide sales and will be instrumental in expanding the company's go-to-market strategy and building successful channel partner programs.

NeoAccel announced the VMware version of its flagship product, SSL VPN-Plus. SSL VPN-Plus Gateway is the only 3rd Generation VPN able to replace IPSec and to supersede conventional SSL VPNs which suffer from the TCP-over-TCP meltdown and degraded client-server application performance. Potential VPN buyers can download and evaluate a fully functional version of SSL VPN-Plus from the company's website at www.neoaccel.com.

BLADE Network Technologies announced that it has joined The Green Grid consortium. As a member of the consortium, BLADE will promote the energy efficiency of today's data centers through best practices for implementing 'green' networking infrastructures. As a pioneer of energy-efficient data center networking, BLADE is recognized on AlwaysOn's GoingGreen 100 list of the world's foremost 'green' companies.

Virtualization is fast emerging as a game-changing technology in the enterprise computing space. What was once viewed as a technology useful for testing and development is going mainstream and is affecting the entire data-center ecosystem.

Univa UD announced the publication of a white paper and supporting tools that documents the process of implementing its open source UniCluster product in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service. Univa UD sponsored BioTeam, a life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools. The paper titled How to: UniCluster and Amazon EC2, presents step by step instructions for setting up UniCluster within EC2.

VMware released their new application virtualization solution called ThinApp that was acquired from Thinstall earlier this year. ThinApp is a bit different than most of the other app virtualization solutions on the market as at the end of the day IT is left with a standalone application package (.exe file) that can be deployed to any Windows device (32 or 64bit) through your existing application deployment mechanisms.

Beijing PowerUnique Technologies announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver solutions to mutual customers.

VMware announced it has completed the acquisition of B-hive Networks. VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive on May 28, 2008. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines.

'Virtualization use has exploded since our last survey of the European market,' said Chris Ingle, consulting and research director of IDC's Systems Group, as IDC this week released its 2008 European Server Virtualization Survey. The study was first carried out in 2007 and has been repeated in 1Q08 with a larger sample of organizations and a wider range of questions.

We recently returned from the SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24. The conference hosted a slate of exceptional speakers - representing both the larger industry players such as Red Hat (Brian Stevens), Citrix (Simon Crosby), VMware (Stephen Herrod) and also a very engaging group of virtualization startups executives. The conference...delivered a very knowledgable, engaged and high powered audience. Speakers made a series of high-quality presentations not only of the basic value propositions for adopting virtualization (consolidation, optimization of resources, flexibility etc), but also painted a compelling vision of the future.