There's a fabless semiconductor start-up hidden away out of sight in Vancouver, British Columbia that been rethinking the problem of thin clients and the so-called PC Blade for the last three years. And now that it's got the necessary silicon, firmware and fancy signal processing algorithms in hand - along with a couple of early adopters like IBM and ClearCube - and it's shipping pre-production product ahead of initial volumes in August - it's ready to come out from under the radar and lay its cards on the table, so to speak. The name of this prodigy is Teradici Corporation and it calls its widgetry PC-over-IP technology, meaning it can physically separate the computer from the user long distance.

Perilli is the world's leading evangelist in Virtualization industry since 2003, and the author of the popular popular blog www.virtualization.info. As industry analyst, his work is mostly focused in observing and reporting on new and ongoing virtualiation market trends, maintaining a tight relationship with consolidated vendors and emerging startups.

VMware announced the general availability of VMware ACE 2 Enterprise edition. VMware ACE is a breakthrough product that enables IT desktop managers to create a standard PC environment including operating system, data and applications, wrap it with IT policies to protect the contents, package it into a virtual machine and deploy it to any managed or unmanaged licensed PC client.

File virtualization is getting a little attention in the blogosphere. Yesterday Hu Yoshida wrote about it briefly in his blog, repeating an observation that Jay Kidd from Network Appliance made in this interview on SearchStorage.com where he said that the performance and scalability characteristics of the Filing virtualizing system(s) need to be equal to the aggregate performance and scalability of the NAS/server systems that are 'behind' it.

ASCDI, the Association of Service and Computer Dealers International, has complained to the Office of Fair Trading in the UK about Sun, saying it's breaking UK competition law and closing the secondary market in Sun products in Europe to anyone other than Sun by refusing to supply resellers with provenance information on Sun equipment.

Armed with the latest low-voltage chips from Intel and AMD, Flash-based storage and an acoustic door for racks, IBM is telling customers that its latest blade and System x servers will reduce energy use, associated carbon dioxide emissions and noise in the data center.

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, and Passlogix announced an expanded strategic partnership that will result in tighter integration between the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system and the Passlogix v-GO Sign-On Platform authentication and enterprise single sign-on (ESSO) technologies, respectively. The new terms of the relationship also provide for the transition of responsibilities for RSA's own ESSO solution, RSA Sign-on Manager, to Passlogix.

LANDesk Software, a leading provider of systems, security, and process management solutions for desktops, servers and mobile devices across the enterprise, today announced an OEM relationship with Thinstall, a leading application virtualization solution provider. The two companies have agreed to collaborate on the integration of Thinstall's application virtualization technology into LANDesk's systems management solutions. This integration is designed to give customers the ability to deploy and manage virtualized applications in heterogeneous IT environments.

Intel's Reagan-like strategy of spending its way out of armed nuclear conflict with AMD seems to be working. The telltale sign is its gross margin. Intel had predicted a dour 49% for the first quarter but when the results came in on Tuesday it had managed 50.1% and with new if guarded optimism raised its full-year projection from 50% to 51% in the expectation of a stronger second half.

The so-called 'Deep Web' search arena is really heating up, according to Fetch. Several business are already using the company's technology to turn the Web into a usable database, the company says. One example deploying its technology to provide detailed personal background information from a variety of public and private information resources for the largest background search companies in the country.

EMC Corporation , the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today reported record first-quarter revenue and strong profit growth. Highlights of the quarter included increased demand for VMware virtual infrastructure solutions and RSA information security software and accelerating growth in the company's Asia-Pacific and Japan operations.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped by at our publisher's offices (SYS-CON Media) and they showed me our Flex book with the correct cover, but all pages were blank. Yesterday, I've got an email from them with the words, 'Yakov your book is ready, stop by and pick it up'. The guys from production department are really nice, so they've attached this video just to show me that the book is really really finally super-duper ready. Check this out (the video file is large though).

According to a report recently released byresearch firm TheInfoPro, blade servers are finally ready for mass adoptionas Fortune 1000 and mid-sized enterprises turn to blades to empowervirtualization, consolidation and 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

The new benchmark report titled: 'Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle,' is based on a survey of more than 210 organizations worldwide. Aimed at identifying emerging best practices for SOA lifecycle management and governance, the independent research was co-sponsored by Mindreef, Inc.

A lot of water has run under the bridge in the three years since Sun and Fujitsu vowed to replace their respective Sparc/Solaris-based Sun Fire and PrimePower machines with a 'co-developed' Advanced Product Line (APL) - using a 90nm 2.4GHz dual-threaded dual-core Fujitsu Sparc 64 VI - but it seems that something is going to come of that pact after all - albeit a year behind schedule.

'The SOA software market is poised for healthy growth as large enterprises across all verticals are adopting SOA-based solutions for their business related issues,' notes John F. Andrews, President of Evans Data Corporation. 'Enterprise integration and the need for flexible business processes continues to drive the demand for SOA as a viable and popular option to achieving competent IT infrastructure.

Seems that 44% of the people they talked who said they had deployed server virtualization couldn't call the deployment a success because they couldn't quantify the ROI; 28% failed to realize an ROI or were unsure that they did; and 40% either failed to realize the documented cost savings or were unsure what cost savings, if any, they did realize. Of those who figured that they had gotten an ROI 4% achieved it in less than a month, 55% in the first year and 13% more than a year from deployment. And the ROI realized was subject to a great deal of variability: 20% realized an ROI of less than 10%; 61% between 10% and 24%; and 19% an ROI of 25% or more.

Dell won't be getting its 10-K out any time soon. It's gonna blow through April 3, the day the 10-K is due, and April 18, the extension date. It's gonna add the annual report for the year ended February 2 to the pile of paperwork it already owes the SEC, It says it's waiting for its Audit Committee to finish the internal investigation it started last August. The SEC is also investigating.

A survey conducted on behalf of Computer Associates has found that, although there are undeniable benefits of virtualization, many organizations are failing to make the most of the technology; mainly because they are not taking a holistic approach to deployment. Heterogeneous virtualized environments are the norm.

Virtual server sprawl, lack of visibility and reporting, and an inability to measure return on investment (ROI) are hampering users, according to a double-blind survey commissioned by CA and carried out Canadian research company The Strategic Counsel. The survey covered 808 organizations with 500 or more employees in Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe, all of whom are adopting virtualization.

Jeff Christian, the guy who started Christian & Timbers and the headhunter who got Carly Fiorina the CEO job at HP, is going to be tried for reckless homicide and involuntary manslaughter in the drug overdose death of another executive recruiter, 31-year-old Thomas Wasil, according to a centerfold story in BusinessWeek

Keeping in step with the Linux kernel development, the OpenVZ project announced availability of its operating system (OS) server virtualization software for the most recent stable Linux kernel 2.6.20 -- introduced last month. This new Linux kernel includes a number of bug fixes and improvements, along with support for the latest hardware. 'Linux 2.6.20 is also the basis for the next Ubuntu distribution, which potentially would enable us a smooth transition to add OpenVZ virtualization,' said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. 'With this latest release of OpenVZ software, we've made a number of improvements to benefit our users in the open source community.'

IBM and Intel are holding hands now over an initiative to push virtualization on multiprocessors, saying larger, more expandable MP servers deliver the best return on investment. To prove their point, they've come up with a new virtualization benchmarking methodology called vConsolidate that runs multiple instances of consolidated database, mail, web and Java workloads in multiple virtual partitions on IBM's industry-standard servers that's supposed to simulate real-world server performance in a typical environment.

Secure64, which as you might expect is best friends with Intel and HP - but not to the point either of them has put money in the joint - claims that it's got the first and only DNS server software that's immune to rootkits and malware and resistant to denial of service attacks. And it got that way because they built it that way from the ground up, taking advantage of certain hardware-architected security protections unique to the Itanium.

The author of Sprajax, an open source tool for assessing the security of AJAX-enabled web applications, will be giving a session in the 'Web 2.0' track at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo being held 19-21 March, 2007, in New York's Roosevelt Hotel.

In 2006, Incipient, Inc. made storage industry history by bringing to market its switch-resident storage virtualization software for Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. This accomplishment further established Incipient as an innovator and leader in the storage virtualization market. With the 2006 release of its flagship product, the Incipient Network Storage Platform(TM) (iNSP(TM)) software suite, the company is poised to meet the growing enterprise demand for data migration, automated storage provisioning and copy services. These iNSP capabilities, now delivered from the network, allow companies to reduce the overall cost of managing, deploying and operating SAN-based storage, resulting in a lower SAN Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Incipient, Inc. today announced that its flagship software product, the Incipient Network Storage Platform(TM) (iNSP(TM)) software suite, achieved general availability (GA) on December 21, 2006. The iNSP suite is the industry's first storage virtualization solution that is embedded on industry standard director-class intelligent Fibre Channel (FC) switches. For the first time, users will be able to migrate data within a storage area network (SAN) using switch-based storage virtualization software without disruption to applications. iNSP supports the Cisco MDS 9000 Series of intelligent FC switches with the 32-Port Storage Services Module (SSM). This integrated solution greatly reduces the complexity and cost of managing SAN storage and is the first true enterprise-class storage virtualization solution on the market. Incipient has certified iNSP's interoperability with arrays from top tier storage vendors that include EMC, HP, HDS and IBM. iNSP is now available through Incipient and its business partners.

EMC is going to IPO 10% of VMware this summer. It'll give VMware a recruiting and retention incentive and money that's not EMC's to grow on. It's also supposed to increase the visibility into VMware's performance and signal that the company is committed to its open platform strategy EMC will keep the other 90% and says it has no intention of spinning VMware out or otherwise divesting itself of the rest of this 'precious' asset, which it called 'one of the fast-growing businesses in the history of the software industry.'

Further extending its leadership role in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), BEA Systems, Inc. , a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced its ground-breaking entry into the virtualization market accompanied with an aggressive strategy and product roadmap, uniquely aimed at Java environments. The move underscores the growing industry trend of system virtualization, the bundling of software applications with optimized OS functionality to run on hardware-independent virtual infrastructure and thus the decoupling of the software from the hardware through virtualization. Analysts are predicting as much as 40 percent of new server demand to be virtualized by 2010.

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen(TM) hypervisor, today announced a comprehensive family of server virtualization products supported and maintained by the company leading the evolution of Xen. Designed to meet the needs of a broad range of users, the XenSource XenServer product family includes the recently announced XenEnterprise(TM), the market's first enterprise-grade commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows® and Linux guests. New additions include XenServer(TM), for Windows standard server environments; and, XenExpress(TM), a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Available now, all three products share the same architecture, delivering bare metal performance and facilitating easy migration and upgrades. Additionally, the new products offer a broad array of hardware device support, giving customers hardware investment protection and high utility. With extensive code contributions from Intel and AMD to optimize Xen performance on their newest CPUs, the new products immediately enable users to leverage the power of the Xen paravirtualized architecture and processors with Intel VT and AMD Virtualization(TM) -- which include hardware virtualization support for superior performance.

Total Enterprise Virtualization has been made possible, primarily, by the strong adoption of VMware server virtualization and the maturity and affordability of new virtual SAN software solutions like DataCore's SANmelody(TM). In addition, an ecosystem of virtualization-complement ary products and services has developed in the wake of VMware's success. The emergence of additional, major entrants into the server virtualization market, such as Microsoft, Virtual Iron and XenSource, is a testament to the tangible business benefits that virtualization affords -- chiefly, consolidation, flexibility and hardware independence, among others.

AccuRev announced that its best-of-breed software configuration management solution, AccuRev SCM, has been qualified to run on virtual machines. AccuRev has announced support for VMware® (NYSE:EMC), and Sun Solaris 10 Zones from Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW). Virtualization is rapidly becoming a standard piece of the deployment platform in IT organizations because the technology provides tangible benefits both in terms of capital cost reductions and operational flexibility. This is spurring CIOs to push for more rapid adoption of enterprise applications that fully support server virtualization.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of six new deployment tools that will help expedite businesses' migration to Windows Vista(TM). The recently released tools are the Microsoft(R) Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment 1.0, the Volume Activation Management Tool, the Key Management Service for Windows Server(R) 2003 and Virtual PC 2007.

Global 360, a leading provider of business process management (BPM), intelligence and optimization solutions, today renewed its commitment to providing customers with tightly integrated BPM and process intelligence solutions through the utilization of Microsoft's .NET environment and industry-leading Microsoft applications which include extended support for Office 2007 targeted for May 2007.

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced version 7.0 of the Rainfinity(R) Global File Virtualization(TM) solution, extending EMC's market-leading capabilities in file virtualization and management to support enterprise archiving from heterogeneous file and network attached storage (NAS) systems to the EMC Centera(TM) content addressed storage (CAS) platform. The Rainfinity Global File Virtualization solution now offers customers a single platform to manage both active and inactive files throughout a file's lifecycle across heterogeneous environments.

Today at VMworld, DataCore Software is showcasing the versatility of its SANmelody(TM) SAN software, which supports both Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI connectivity. SANmelody software, with its auto fail-over, enterprise-level iSCSI capabilities and state-of-the-art storage services, is an ideal solution for enterprises seeking to implement business continuance and disaster recovery infrastructures supporting VMware ESX environments. Customers who have not implemented a VMware Virtual Infrastructure because of the high cost of FC SANs are finding that SANmelody, which gives users the choice of iSCSI, FC or mixed networks, makes it affordable and practical to do so.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers as they become highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure as needs change. In an effort to address these challenges, many IT professionals are turning to virtualization technologies.

Pop quiz: what company both doubled its annual revenue in 2006 and closed a $26.25 million round of funding? Clue: it also tracked 290,000 downloads of its RIA platform and lined up IBM, Walmart.com, H&R Block, Monster, Barclays Global and Pandora as customers. Extra clue: it also announced project 'Orbit' which will allow developers using its platform to compile into Java Mobile and run it on devices.

Well, if it can make it x86-compatible, get somebody to write a workable operating system for it, teach the world a new way of parallel computing-style programming, and produce it in volume, Intel is going to have itself a general-purpose 'Teraflops' chip in a few years. The company has so far managed a 'shock and awe' 80-core research prototype that it unveiled this week for all to gaze on in admiration at the Integrated Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. The disclosure is considered an industry proof-point.

When you think about virtualization, you probably think about VMware, or maybe Xen, and hopefully, even OpenVZ. With all the buzz surrounding this space, I thought it time to discuss three of the four different types of virtualization: emulation, paravirtualization, operating system-level virtualization, and multi-server (cluster) virtualization. The last is outside the scope of this article.