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.

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.

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.

Seanodes released the results of a third-party survey of IT professionals that shows that the transition from direct attached storage to networked storage is dictated by needs that come with server virtualization, such as VM migration, elevating costs and complexity, while taxing performance and management. The survey, with respondents including network and systems administrators and other IT personnel from organizations of all sizes, sheds light on how virtualized infrastructures raise the levels of stress and demand on networked storage, creating a tenuous situation of economic sustainability against the high costs of improved storage performance.

DataCore announced that JMR Construction has become a DataCore SANmelody customer courtesy of DataCore partner Integral Networks. VMware and DataCore serve as a way forward for the DataCore partner and customer alike. The combination provides a cost effective alternative that made it practical for JMR to save by not having to invest in additional, physical servers.

3PAR announced that a recently released report by the Taneja Group defines and analyzes a new category of next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems from vendors including 3PAR. The report forecasts revenue growth for next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems for the period between 2007 and 2011 and identifies shifts in the Fibre Channel storage market that Taneja believes are largely responsible for driving revenue growth for this new segment.

DataCore announced that it has accepted a $30 million equity investment from Insight Venture Partners and Updata Partners. Insight Venture Partners is a private equity and venture capital firm focused on the global software and Internet industries. Updata Partners is an information technology-focused venture capital firm whose general partners have been active as investors and operators in the IT industry for more than two decades.

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Existing storage management methods and tools can't keep pace with exploding storage requirements. Application expansion, digital media formats, and regulatory compliance have all contributed to the fast-growing demand. According to IDC, storage administrator productivity has to increase 60% a year just to keep up with the anticipated growth in storage capacity. To make matters worse, 24x7 data access requirements are closing the management windows available to administrators to do management tasks.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Enterprises of all sizes are building flexible storage infrastructures using Internet SCSI (iSCSI) and advanced virtualization technologies that let them allocate and shift SAN resources dynamically in response to the demands of their virtualized server environments.

NetApp announced that the Breckenridge Group (BGI) created a more efficient and effective storage environment with the recent implementation of the StoreVault S500 storage solution. BGI is a management firm specializing in the development, operations, and ongoing support of various restaurant and hotel locations throughout the western United States. BGI's IT environment consisted of 150 workstations and 250 PC-based point of sales (POS) terminals in the field along with 80 workstations, 14 physical servers, and 16 virtual servers that were located in the company's main office. With more than 4TB of direct-attached storage (DAS), the tasks of archiving, accessing, and backing up data were cumbersome.

DataCore Software announced that Woodgrain Millwork has purchased and deployed its flagship SANsymphony software from DataCore authorized partner Right! Systems (RSI). RSI is a solution provider of virtualization solutions. 'SANsymphony allowed us to add a new EMC array and make it work effectively with our existing HP EVA storage, improving and harnessing the combination to run in tandem and support our mix of database, ERP and VMware server systems,' said Chip Olsen, senior systems engineer, Woodgrain Millwork. 'With SANsymphony now in place, we have been able to significantly improve performance and address the uptime and availability issue for our SQL servers and ERP application - something mission-critical to our operations.'

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

The Belgian Post Office collaborated with NetApp for its data backup and archival. To manage this data, the post office is switching to a virtual infrastructure developed by NetApp in combination with conventional physical tape. In doing this, the post office is keeping pace with the current trend of virtualization in the storage environment, minimizing risk, and maximizing its return on investment in IT spend.

DataCore announced that St. Marien Amberg Hospital has implemented SANmelody as the storage foundation that supports its information systems and PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) project running on a VMware environment. The virtual infrastructure not only offers high availability, better performance and lower management costs, but also halves the electricity and cooling costs by using less hardware to do more work. 'By using a combination of DataCore storage and VMware server virtualization, we have laid the foundation for an IT environment of the future,' said Dr Dietmar Braeuer, head of information technology at St. Marien Amberg Hospital. 'More flexibility, more functionality and performance, less hardware.'

DataCore Software announced that DDI Health in Australia has selected, deployed and is realizing notable benefits from DataCore's SANmelody virtual SAN software to manage its storage and support its software development servers and VMware systems. DDI Health produces a range of solutions across the diagnostic health services sector. The company was grappling with wasted disk space, 'out of disk space' warnings that force systems and applications to be shut down to add more disks and constant disk provisioning issues. Whereas one set of servers would be full, another set would have disk space to spare, thereby making the provisioning of disk space between systems an on-going and fairly labor-intensive undertaking. With SANmelody in place to allocate disk space to physical and virtual servers as well as workstations, the administration team's disk management headache has disappeared. Now there is very little wasted disk space. Not only had disk administration been labor-intensive, it was also fairly problematic and the resulting downtime was very disruptive to daily operations.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Microsoft has confirmed that the Vista-generation Longhorn Server is officially going to be called Windows Server 2008, a name indicative of when it will come out. The company already admitted last week that the Viridian virtualization widgetry meant to complement Longhorn has shucked some major features so it can get out within six months of Longhorn.

AMD's first quarter was a disaster. It's not just that its ASPs were gutted by the price war with Intel, '80%' of AMD's problems were simply shipments, its CEO Hector Ruiz said. ASPs were only a 'small piece' of the picture, Ruiz said, a fact that has a lot to do with Intel's product overhaul. He said it took Intel four years to do it, but 'they did a good job.'

Brocade announced the availability of Brocade Access Gateway for HP BladeSystem offerings. The new feature enables interoperability between Brocade blade SAN switches and products from other SAN switch and director manufacturers, while also improving SAN management and reducing costs.

Tape used to be much cheaper than on-line storage. Not any more. While it is still neither infinite nor free (and it's certainly not free to manage), on-line storage is pretty inexpensive these days. A smaller company needs tapes for disaster recovery (although on-line vendor-based alternatives exist), but daily backups should be on-line.

The demand for storage will continue to grow. Endless amounts of data are being created driving greater storage capacity requirements and price improvements. That same data must be classified and moved into various tiers of storage to facilitate cost-effective implementations. Information lifecycle management (ILM) offers a set of practices and tools for managing the classification and movement of data in alignment with service-level and cost-of-ownership objectives.