IBM is acquiring Transitive Corporation, a specialist in cross-platform virtualisation, which allows applications written for one type of processor and operating system to run on other platforms, with little or no modifications. Big Blue will use the technology to help customers consolidate their Linux-based applications onto the IBM systems.

READ THE REST

AMD and Red Hat have demonstrated live migration of a virtual machine across different vendor platforms, specifically from an Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, using Red Hat’s open source KVM virtualisation software.

READ THE REST

Virtualisation specialist Virtual Iron Software is expanding its business relationship with Storage Area Network vendor LeftHand Networks, by joining LeftHand’s Technology Alliance Program. The move comes as HP - a partner of rival VMware - is moving towards completion of its acquisition of LeftHand.

READ THE REST

Sun Microsystems has announced Solaris 10 10/08, the latest update to its flagship operating system, including enhancements to the ZFS file system, Intel Architecture support and its container virtualisation approach. Several of the enhancements were accomplished through the OpenSolaris community. Separately, IBM and Sun have have announced that OpenSolaris is now available for IBM System z mainframes.

READ THE REST

By Jake Sorofman, rPath

Agile techniques, dynamic programming languages, mashups, and frameworks are all part of the same trend of driving time and cost out of the application development process. The problem is that the speed and agility we’ve achieved in the domain of “apps” hasn’t crossed over into the domain of “ops,” which is where application value is realised.

READ THE REST

This past week has seen Microsoft making the headlines with its plans to enter the cloud computing space, as well as for Windows 7, the planned replacement for its desktop Vista operating system. Both are likely to have significant impacts on its business and customers, and both are at least partly defensive moves in different ways. Less of a headline but just as interesting for financial IT shops was the preview it presented of Project Velocity, its entry into the distributed caching world.

READ THE REST

By Jake Sorofman, rPath

Think of any historical IT transformation and you’ll likely recall the pain associated with change. For large organisations, change isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t occur overnight. It requires a finessed combination of planning, validating, selling and a fair amount of political cajoling to get people signed up for the change. It also requires an incremental, stepwise progression that yields benefits along the way — without this, stakeholders become fatigued, enthusiasm wanes and projects lose steam. When merchandised effectively, these incremental wins become the kindling that stokes the fire, building the enthusiasm, conviction and confidence required for transformation.

READ THE REST

Virtual appliance specialist rPath has announced a Cloud Computing Adoption Model, which defines a pragmatic, five-level approach for the graduated adoption of cloud computing with measurable benefits. The five levels of cloud computing adoption include:

READ THE REST

Billy Marshall is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at rPath and he writes about virtualisation and virtual appliances here.

Merrill Lynch is adopting IBM’s iDataPlex servers to build an internal cloud within its data centres to reduce power consumption, and related costs. As the investment bank is integrated into Bank of America, cost savings are a top priority. Specifically, the servers will help Merrill Lynch build and evaluate new risk-analysis programs.

READ THE REST

This week, the M word has popped up in a few places. The company moved to make its Hyper-V virtualisation hypervisor available as a standalone product, and for free. It’s also bundled into its Windows Server 2008 operating system. Remember what happened when it took the joint bundling/free approach with Internet Explorer? Basically, it meant curtains for Netscape, the then leading browser. The folks at VMware - including CEO (and former Microsoft exec) Paul Maritz - should be worried!

READ THE REST

Following a similar move by VMware, Microsoft has released Hyper-V Server 2008, a free, small-footprint version of its Hyper-V virtualisation software. Previously, Hyper-V was available only as part of its Windows Server 2008 family.

READ THE REST

By David Bartoletti for Enigmatec Corp.

This four-part series explores how virtualisation is shaking up the data centre by challenging traditional approaches to IT management, and how you can meet the growing demand for virtual services – and still maintain control and compliance - with policy-based IT process automation. In Part 1, I reviewed the pressures on the data centre and the industry initiatives emerging to help meet them. Part 2 focuses on how virtualisation affects the entire IT lifecycle, from request through provisioning, change management, and retirement. Part 3 introduces policy-based automation and its benefits for managing virtual resources. Lastly, in Part 4, I will focus specifically on combining virtualisation with automation for the delivery of mission-critical financial services applications.

READ THE REST

GigaSpaces Technologies has released version 6.6 of its eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) 6.6, delivering a scale-out application server designed to scale predictably and on-demand, allowing firms to be better prepared for peak loads and spikes in demand for their applications and services. The company is also introducing new subscription and pay-per-use pricing models that will make XAP an affordable and flexible option and leverage economies of scale made possible by cloud computing.

READ THE REST

By David Bartoletti for Enigmatec Corp.

This four-part series explores how virtualisation is shaking up the data centre by challenging traditional approaches to IT management, and how you can meet the growing demand for virtual services – and still maintain control and compliance - with policy-based IT process automation. In Part 1, I reviewed the pressures on the data centre and the industry initiatives emerging to help meet them. Part 2 focuses on how virtualisation affects the entire IT lifecycle, from request through provisioning, change management, and retirement. Part 3 introduces policy-based automation and its benefits for managing virtual resources. Lastly, in Part 4, I will focus specifically on combining virtualisation with automation for the delivery of mission-critical financial services applications.

READ THE REST

Lots of news items lately related to virtualisation. VMware held its annual conference this week in Las Vegas, a chance for new-ish CEO Paul Maritz to set out a vision and try to get over recent corporate trauma (the firing of former CEO Diane Greene, the resignation of Greene’s husband and top visionary Mendel Rosenblum, and other departures) and the licensing bug that probably set big corporate’s virtualisation plans back a few months.

READ THE REST

Cloud computing infrastructure-on-demand vendor 3Tera is partnering with virtualisation specialist Citrix Systems to bring cloud computing solutions to customers as external hosted clouds, or as a platform that can be deployed in corporate data centres behind customer firewalls. The combination consists of the Citrix Cloud Centre (C3) solution and 3Tera’s AppLogic platform.

READ THE REST

With an eye on the high-end server market, and virtualisation in particular, Intel launched its Xeon 7400 processor series (codenamed Dunnington), consisting of seven 45 nanometer chips, with up to six processing cores per chip and 16MB of shared cache memory. Software vendors supporting the processors include Citrix Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and VMware.

READ THE REST

By David Bartoletti for Enigmatec Corp.

This four-part series explores how virtualisation is shaking up the data centre by challenging traditional approaches to IT management, and how you can meet the growing demand for virtual services – and still maintain control and compliance - with policy-based IT process automation. In Part 1, I reviewed the pressures on the data centre and the industry initiatives emerging to help meet them. Part 2 focuses on how virtualisation affects the entire IT lifecycle, from request through provisioning, change management, and retirement. Part 3 introduces policy-based automation and its benefits for managing virtual resources. Lastly, in Part 4, I will focus specifically on combining virtualisation with automation for the delivery of mission-critical financial services applications.

READ THE REST

Microsoft and Novell have announced a joint virtualisation solution, including Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, configured and tested as a guest operating system running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

READ THE REST