There has been much speculation about the security posture of virtualized environments. One identified vulnerability is the 'hypervisor' threat in which a hacker can break out of a guest OS and onto the host OS of a server. How great a danger is the hypervisor threat? What security barriers should IT erect before and after they implement their virtual environment? Virtual security expert Hezi Moore will help attendees separate the virtualized wheat from the real chaff.

Composite Software provides a virtual approach to data integration. Hundreds of enterprises including five of the top six U.S. investment banks as well several Government agencies, such as the Office of Secretary of Defense and Intelligence, and software vendors including Cognos, Informatica and BMC, rely on the Composite Information Server to virtualize, abstract and federate data from multiple, disparate sources and deliver this real-time information to their applications. Composite Software's technology fulfills real-time information requirements, enabling enterprises to respond faster to business requests, reduce their data integration costs, and keep pace with ever-changing business needs.

VMware announced the upcoming availability of VMware ThinApp 4, an application virtualization solution that lets customers run multiple versions of virtually any application on any Windows operating system without conflict. For example, users can run both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 on the same operating system without disruption. ThinApp, based on Thinstall technology, the leading agentless application virtualization solution, requires no pre-installed software on physical or virtual PCs and no new deployment infrastructure or management tools.

Success in business increasingly relies on proactively harnessing the power of advanced technologies to manage processes, information, and relationships. Today's IT intensive enterprise must always be on the lookout for the latest in innovation that allow businesses to run with fewer resources while providing the infrastructure to meet today and future customer needs. Virtualization technologies are driving a top to bottom overhaul of the computing industry. The growing awareness of the advantages provided by agile virtualized environments is brought about by economic factors of scarce resources, government regulation, and more competition. Many leading corporations are embarking on virtualization initiatives on their path to predictive enterprise. This keynote explores the following aspects: Top CIO issues facing today?s IT environment, Understanding Key trends and challenges facing virtualization adoption across the enterprise, Examine Industry Requirements to enable and accelerate the virtualization journey, and Intel?s platform innovation/strategy and eco system partnerships addressing the challenges.

Novell announced it is collaborating with VMware to improve Linux performance in VMware environments by incorporating support for the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) into the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel. Demonstrating their commitment to provide open interoperability and optimization for virtualized environments, the companies have worked together to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for the VMware platform.

Bay Microsystems announced that SOFTBANK TELECOM has deployed Bay Microsystems ABEx2020 Multi-Service Transport Gateway to deliver high- performance carrier Infiniband services as part of its Wide Area Virtualization infrastructure and to demonstrate its automated multi-site disaster recovery solution.

Fortinet announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company four additional patents for network virtualization and security related inventions. These new patents strengthen Fortinet's growing intellectual property portfolio, bringing Fortinet's total awarded patents to 17.

At Marathon Technologies, we service a range of industries that must have their applications up and running at all times, or as we call it: vAvailable. vAvailable is the integration of virtualization and high availability technologies to create a cost-effective solution that ensures applications won't go down. With virtualization technologies, high availability has now launched well between today's alternative solutions such as clustering. This session will define vAvailable and this is a huge step between today's alternatives. Mr. Melnick will discuss a new standard for application availability using virtualization technology that embraces Windows and business process applications.

Today, many organizations hear the term virtualization and still only think of the technology used in a datacenter. While this might be where virtualization started and has received a lot of attention, the next wave of virtualization is happening in connected devices through embedded technologies. When applied, virtualization allows organizations and developers working with front-end connected devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and WiMax base stations, to experience business benefits such as reduced bill-of-material costs, faster time-to-market and richer, more functional designs that feature reduced power, improved security and greater reliability.

Computer systems manage and protect increasingly high value information and assets across the enterprise. Meanwhile, hackers grow in number and resourcefulness. Commercial virtualization solutions add to the already fertile attack surface of enterprise operating systems. Green Hills discusses the state of enterprise security threats and presents a secure operating environment that can guarantee the security of the world's critical infrastructure, financial systems, medical records, and corporate intellectual property. This solution uses technology adopted in the military and intelligence community to protect sensitive national secrets.

Seanodes introduced the latest version of its Exanodes - Virtual Machine Edition, which offers easy connectors and integration with server virtualization solutions to extend their capabilities to application servers' internal disks by converting direct attached storage into networked storage. As with previous versions of Exanodes, the VM Edition is designed to alleviate the pain points associated with network storage by enabling consolidation of an organization's underutilized server storage into a high-performance virtualized storage pool.

HP announced it is expanding its strategic collaboration with VMware to introduce new integrated software offerings that help customers seamlessly automate the management of heterogeneous environments. New integrations of HP business technology optimization (BTO) software for the VMware virtualization platform will allow customers to seamlessly manage across both physical and virtual environments.

AMD announced that a four-socket server from Dell with Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors has achieved the top score for virtualization performance based on the VMmark benchmark from VMware. The Dell PowerEdge R905 with Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors notched an official top score for four-socket servers of 14.17 and achieved a score of 10 tiles or 60 virtual machines.

Embotics announced the sponsorship of a new research benchmark report entitled 'Virtual Strategies: Managing Servers, Desktops and Storage for Infrastructure Efficiency' by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company. The research details how best-in-class companies manage virtual servers, desktops and storage for greater efficiency.

StoneFly introduced SAN-based encryption capabilities that give enterprise customers another layer of protection in combating damaging internal and external security breaches while also simplifying compliance initiatives. Now available as an integrated part of the StoneFly Integrated Storage Concentrator (ISC) line of high-availability IP SANs, the new SAN-based encryption will also be offered with other StoneFly IP SANs later this year.

VMware Virtualization Management vender VKernel just released an update to their 'Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer' virtual appliance. The 1.2 release includes over 35 new features and enhancements such as the collection status information is now provided on the dashboard so you always know that the data being presented is accurate and a slew of other features to give you detailed information and insight on where you may have excess capacity in your VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

DataCore announced that Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) has purchased, deployed and benefited from the productivity and cost savings achieved from using DataCore's SANmelody storage virtualization software. SANmelody now forms the foundation for the IT department's consolidation and modernization approach. SANmelody virtualizes, safeguards, manages, and thin provisions storage for MCCS, while optimizing disk storage utilization, simplifying administration and boosting overall performance.

Parallels announced that Parallels Server for Mac, a server virtualization solution for Intel-powered Apple systems, is now available. Parallels Server for Mac is a powerful and easy-to-use hypervisor solution for server virtualization that provides a great value for cost conscious organizations seeking to standardize and optimize their IT infrastructures. It can run on any Intel-powered Apple hardware, including the Xserve and Mac Pro, running OS X Leopard Server and comes to market after a successful worldwide beta testing program involving Mac, Windows and Linux server professionals.

ManageIQ announced Version 2.0 of its Enterprise Virtualization Management (EVM) Suite. The EVM suite, powered by ManageIQ's patent-pending SmartState technology, provides the essential insight, control and automation enterprises need to maintain the manageability, reliability and security of their virtual infrastructures. Version 2.0 expands EVM's policy-based virtual configuration management capabilities, and provides enterprises with significant new features supporting advanced virtualization deployments.

Xsigo Systems is the technology leader in data center I/O virtualization, a solution that reduces IT expense by changing the way that servers are connected to networks and storage. The Xsigo I/O Director delivers the following benefits and more: 70% fewer cables, cards, switch ports, 50% less capital cost, 100x greater agility and centralized, remote control of I/O resources.

How is Hyper-V different from the Virtual Server type experience? How come it doesn't feel like a hypervisor based virtualization solution? Is File Virtualization the next great wave? Do database applications running on individual physical servers represent a large consolidation opportunity? Is 'sprawl' more likely in the virtual world? These and a host of other virtualization technology-related issues will be the focus of this Power Panel featuring some of the industry's leading executives and practitioners.

Wind River introduced a comprehensive multicore software solution for device development. Wind River's multicore software solution will help companies solve complex business challenges by taking advantage of multicore processing and virtualization. In connection with this announcement, Wind River announced that it will introduce a scalable hypervisor that will enable virtualization for devices across a broad range of vertical markets, including networking, industrial and consumer devices.

Application delivery infrastructure firm, Citrix Systems' XenServer, has been chosen by managed web hosting company, INetU, for the launch of its new virtualization offering. INetU will be managing virtual servers for clients running Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux. Virtualization technology offers a myriad of benefits for the clients of managed hosting including simplified server migration, backup and restoration through snapshot technology and the ability to maximize investments in hardware. INetU chose Citrix XenServer after extensive research and testing.

NEC Corporation of America announced new system continuity software solutions, with aggressive pricing, designed to drive adoption of best-practice high availability solutions for virtual systems and extend NEC's 40-plus percent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) in the North American market since 2005.

3Leaf Systems announced that is has successfully performed interoperability testing of the 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server with the HP BladeSystem c-Class and an HP StorageWorks 8100 Enterprise Virtual Array running VMware ESX. Successful completion of interoperability testing with HP marks a key milestone in 3Leaf's strategy and commitment to delivering greater data center resource utilization and reduced costs through virtualization solutions for the x86 server market.

There is plenty of discussion about virtualization, but who does it really benefit? How can enterprises adopt virtualization technologies to address real business problems? Is virtualization just another consolidation technology? How are other businesses using virtualization? Is there more that it can do to drive competitive advantage, business efficiency, security and compliance? Drawing on the industry's most in-depth independent research into virtualization to date, Andi Mann, senior analyst from Enterprise Management Associates, will help you to understand what are the key business drivers for virtualization, where to expect significant benefits and how to make sure that virtualization delivers strategic advantages.

This presentation will compare and contrast Web application virtualization solutions such as WebSphere Extended Deployment and hardware virtualization solutions. Particular emphasis will be provided on how the two solutions can be combined to provide the most flexible Web application hosting environment.

InstallFree is a provider of application and desktop virtualization solutions. InstallFree enables corporate IT departments to centrally deploy software applications and complete desktops to employees at any location enabling corporations to lower their Total Cost of Ownership, improve the manageability of applications and desktops, and improve the end-user's productivity.

The AMD v Intel private antitrust suit - otherwise known as the 'No Lawyer Left Behind Program' - is so big and unwieldy that the special master in charge of sorting out discovery has pushed the trial date back from April of 2009 to February of 2010 to give the parties enough time to depose all the witnesses.

VirtenSys has developed a PCI Express based I/O technology that virtualizes and shares off-the-shelf I/O adapters among multiple physical servers without the need for adapter, device driver, or server modifications. This technology is a critical capability that will accelerate adoption of the VirtenSys PCI Express I/O virtualization products. The cost effective VirtenSys products improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent; enhance throughput, and reduce I/O cost and power consumption by as much as 50 percent. The products also simplify data center management by dynamically allocating, sharing, and migrating I/O resources among servers without physical re-configuration, resulting in reduced Operational Expenses (OpEx).

This session will focus on Application Virtualization with particular focus on achieving Web-scale. The session will compare and contrast external cloud deployment to internal deployment on commodity infrastructure.

Virtualization has taken hold in the data center, addressing some of the most pressing issues customers face including excessive power and cooling, and low server utilization. But this is only the first wave of virtualization and only addresses the server. What's next? Enter 'Virtualization 2.0,' where the benefits extend from capital cost reduction to lower operational expenses, improved service levels, agility and IT simplicity. This next wave virtualizes beyond the server, encompassing data center infrastructure (storage, networking and processing) to unbind applications from servers and create a fully agile data center. This session explores Virtualization 2.0 and what it will mean for bottom line business.

Grid Dynamics is a fast growing consulting company. Grid Dynamics advise and engineer systems and solutions of 'extreme' performance, scale and reliability. Our clients - leading financial, technology, Internet, communication and entertainment companies such as eBay or Bank of America - rely on Grid Dynamics to architect, design, prototype, build, or tune their business-critical grid systems. Grid Dynamics work with the latest technologies, platforms and tools, right on - or beyond - the bleeding edge of mainstream computing. Our staff consists of elite scientists and engineers, experts in performance computing.

As computer grids are becoming more wide spread in commercial data centers, the bottlenecks in application performance move from raw processing to searching, storing and retrieving the data. In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) technology solves this fundamental problem by acting as super-efficient application accelerator, taking advantage of unused resources readily available on the grid - disk, memory, IO - to put the data in memory of the same computer that performs the calculations. The talk will explore how IMDG can be easily integrated with existing enterprise grids to create data-aware grid applications and provide application performance acceleration while improving application scalability and reliability.

Splunk is a Silicon Valley company inventing large-scale, high-speed indexing and search technology for IT infrastructures. The company's freely downloadable software indexes and makes it possible to search and navigate data from any application, server or network device in real time. Logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts, scripts and metrics. If a machine can generate it - Splunk can eat it. It's easy to download, install and use, and is very powerful. More than 450 enterprises, government organizations, and service providers and more than 125,000 users achieve higher availability, investigate security incidents in record time, and meet compliance requirements at lower costs with Splunk.

As governments and corporations intensify their focus on reducing energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions, pressure to improve data center energy efficiency will continue to grow. We believe that the following four Rs must play an essential role in the development of any initiative to create a green data center: Regain power and cooling capacity, Recapture resiliency, Reduce energy costs, and Recycle end-of-of-life equipment. Successful organizations will make these four Rs their mantra. And in doing so, their ongoing efforts to think green will help keep their companies operating in the black.

Astaro Corporation is a provider of Unified Threat Management security solutions. Its flagship product, the Astaro Security Gateway, simplifies Email, Web & Network Security and protects over 30,000 networks in 60 countries. Using the proven quality of a hardened Linux platform, the Astaro portfolio integrates open source and commercial security products, powerful management and reporting facilities, and is rounded off with a front end that has ease of use.

The motivations for system virtualization technology in the data center are well known, including resource optimization and improved service availability. But virtualization technology has broader applications throughout the enterprise, including security-enabled mobile devices, virtual appliances, secure servers, personal/corporate shared use laptops, and more. The security requirements for some applications exceed that provided by general purpose virtualization solutions designed for the server environment. Green Hills Software presentation will provide an overview of hypervisor architectures and how they affect the security and practicality of system virtualization in a broad range of compelling applications.

The patented, proven AppStream Management Suite offers virtual delivery, virtual execution and rule-based management for applications, serving end-user systems on the LAN, WAN and Internet from a central management console. AppStream's pull-based, on-demand software distribution platform combines the benefits of server-based computing (self-service access and centralized management & control) and distributed PC computing (disconnected application use and distributed processing), providing a 'best of both worlds' solution. Software deployment via streaming is perfect for remote delivery across the Internet or low-bandwidth extranets because it streams only the application functions that an end user actually needs, when those functions are needed, rather than delivering the entire application in advance. AppStream is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with offices in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

As part of IBM's 'Project Big Green' offerings, IBM announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.