Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Rackspace Hosting's business-class email specialist division, has over 450 resellers, who will have the ability to offer Hosted Exchange 2007 now. Adam Williams, Manager of reseller sales, Mailtrust noted, ''Mailtrust has more than 450 resellers offering Mailtrust's superior messaging services to end customers. Theses resellers are a vital aspect of our business model, accounting for more than 545,000 Noteworthy mailboxes on 113,000 domains. In return, our resellers benefit from our 100 percent uptime guarantees and industry-leading support, as well as a customizable business email solution to sell to their customers, which can save them heartache and money.'' Previously, resellers could only offer Managed Exchange 2003 or Noteworthy, Mailtrust's premier web-based business-class email platform. The ability to offer Hosted Exchange 2007 is due in large part to the newly redesigned Control Panel for Mailtrust users. Mailtrust's Control Panel is an easy...

I don't need to elaborate here

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW - News) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2007: * Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $412 million, an increase of 80% compared to the year-ago quarter. * GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter was $76 million compared to $37 million in the fourth quarter of 2006. Non-GAAP operating income was $108 million, representing 26% of fourth-quarter revenues and an increase of 72% over the year-ago quarter. * GAAP net income for the quarter was $78 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, compared to $31 million, or $0.09 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $103 million, or $0.26 per diluted share. GAAP and non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2007 include a $0.01 per diluted share benefit from a chang...

Congrats to Pano folks and the others as well! By granting the Silver award to Pano Logic's thin-client device, judges recognized the benefits of a truly thin-client device designed specifically for virtual desktop deployments. Meanwhile, the Bronze award resulted in a tie between Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) for their latest quad-core processors with enhanced virtualization capabilities (the Xeon 7300 and quad-core Opteron processor, respectively). In approaching the limits of Moore's Law, x86 processor vendors have recognized that innovation should focus on improved utilization enabled by virtualizing workloads rather than on speed. See more here...

VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, plans to report fourth quarter and full-year 2007 financial results after the close of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday, January 28. The company will host a related conference call at 2:00 PM (PT) / 5:00 PM (ET) that day. A live web broadcast of the event will be available on the VMware Investor Relations website at: http://ir.vmware.com. The replay of the webcast will be available for one month. CNN/PRwire carrying it.

And rightly so, I'd say. Dell, under Michael's stewardship, is going good. Quoting techtarget: 7. Dell/SilverBack -- Services foray Specialties: Remote monitoring/management. Reason for merger: Expansion into managed services. Cost: Not disclosed. Reason the channel should care: Dell's arrival in managed services comes as many resellers hope to move in that direction. Dell's push into managed services via its acquisition of SilverBack Technologies got the channel's attention. The historically direct seller could prove a rival to VARs moving into managed services or reselling them. On the other hand, Dell could use SilverBack -- and its pending purchase of Everdream -- to work more closely with the channel. Both SilverBack and Everdream had been building channel programs. Channel threat or channel ally? The answer may lie somewhere in the middle. Jeff Kaplan, managing director of market consultant ThinkStrategies Inc. , said he believes Dell aims to offer s...

We have Dell (with its EqualLofic acquisition) becoming a strong contender in the SMB and Enterprise market. Here are all the mentioned parties: BakBone Software Inc. Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS - message board ) Data Domain Inc. (Nasdaq: DDUP - message board ) Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL - message board ) EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC - message board ) Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) Hitachi Ltd. (NYSE: HIT - message board ; Paris: PHA) IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM - message board ) Isilon Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ISLN - message board ) LSI Corp. (NYSE: LSI - message board ) Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP - message board ) Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - message board ) XenSource Inc. Quoting B&S: No. 7: Citrix A longtime leader in the remote computing space, Citrix is faced with a head-to-head confrontation with VMware in several markets. Citrix's purchase of XenSource for $500 million this year was a step in the right direction. C...

That woman (and the co-worker team, as she prefers to call her employees) deserves full credit! The president of one of the valley's hottest companies is a private person who loathes talking about herself. But the breakaway performance of her company - which has become the fourth-largest publicly traded software firm in the world after an initial public offering in August - has much to do with the woman who runs it. An MIT- and UC Berkeley-trained engineer and computer scientist, she brings a geek's eye for results to VMware's business of virtualization. As a lifelong sailor, she provides a sense of patience, poise and long-term vision as CEO. And as the third of four children, she's always looking for ways to broker peace and establish partnerships. More here...

Bytes&Switches looks back: VMware VMware is not only the top IT success story of 2007, it is arguably one of the top business stories of the decade. A push for data center consolidation has raised the share price of EMC's brilliant acquisition by 195 percent since its IPO in August. VMware's embedded hypervisor for server motherboards could help up the ante for 2008. and XenSource It's in the hottest IT space imaginable: virtualization. It's been bought by a deep-pocket parent , Citrix, which plans to goose competition with VMware in 2008 by rolling out a hypervisor embedded in hardware from server vendors . If that's not a winning combination, we'll blame Citrix. Check out the whole list here.

This tech panel checked out some stuff that was cool and not so cool in 2007. Virtualization: One of the hottest public-stock offerings this year was VMWare, underscoring the impact that virtualization — software that creates virtual versions of an operating system on a single computer — is starting to have. Score: 3.7 Comments: Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff: "Not sexy, but perhaps the most important trend in IT today." Lazowska: "It's been around since the 1960s (IBM has continuously shipped it on mainframes since that time)." Swenson: "I've read numerous stories about IT managers getting rid of dozens of servers and running all of those apps in separate virtual environments on a single box. This is the nightmare scenario for server companies come to life." See the whole list here!

"For the last five years, all the focus has been on applications -- Facebook, LinkedIn, the social networking and group networking," said Bart Schachter, managing director of Blueprint Ventures, a tech-focused venture capital firm. "The next bottleneck is going to come back to the infrastructure. For the first time in a very long time, we need more computing power." Companies offering more computing power have raked in the IPO money this year. Leading the pack was VMware VMW , the EMC EMC division that makes server hardware more efficient by creating "virtual" servers. VMware was the most lucrative tech IPO of the year, drawing $957million. For a while it was also the most lucrative for investors, as it popped from 29 on its Aug. 14 debut to near 123 on Halloween. Concerns over valuation and competition have pushed shares back below 93, but its return stands at 230%. CNNMoney

The hype over hypervisors was well into a full foam as EMC announced the deal. But when the VMware shares hit Wall Street, the resulting rich and creamy lather reminded one and all the tech IPO madness of the late 1990s could still rise to haunt us. Citrix turned out its pockets and found $500m to acquire XenSource, the developer of the open source Xen hypervisor. The enormous sum gave Citrix some much-needed market appeal while giving XenSource the corporate R&D backing to fight its hulking rival VMware. XenSource had previously been struggling to capture a significant piece of the virtualization battlefield despite strong ties with both Linux and Windows camps. Sun and Virtual Iron are tinkering away at their virtualization products based on Xen as well. Link

The session will define and present the elements of file virtualization, as well as its similarity and differences from server virtualization. It will include different approaches to achieve file virtualization, and the pros and cons associated with these approaches. Wong will also explain how file virtualization is being used as a solution to storage management challenges. Drawing on his unique experience of having successfully implemented both Linux and Windows-based file virtualization appliances, Wong will share his vision for the future of file virtualization, as it expands from the data center to the edges of customer networks, and, eventually to the laptops of the mobile users. At the end of the session, attendees should be able to judge whether file virtualization is, indeed, the next great wave. Wong came to Attune from NeoPath Networks, which he co-founded. At NeoPath, he was vice president of engineering from concept through on-time market delivery of the first two general-...

I will be commenting on the presentations that will be given at Cannes. It will be more practical in nature and will focus on not just warnings but will also be, in some cases, remedial in nature. Stay tuned!

The FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware Virtual Infrastructure is the first solution to provide customers with complete data protection across both physical and virtual systems. Fully certified and integrated with the VMware ESX server, the CDP Virtual Appliance gives organizations the ability to meet data protection challenges by providing continuous availability of the application server and its data across virtual and physical environments. This industry-first data protection solution effectively eliminates backup windows and the need for mandatory restores to deliver true business continuity. “We are particularly proud to receive this award for technological innovation from VARBusiness based on recognition from value-added resellers and solution providers,” said Wendy Petty, vice president of sales, FalconStor Software. “The FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance has been designed to provide channel partners and, in turn, their end-user customers, with a complete data protection...

You can sell virtualization when: People really need to consolidate. Really! People don't know anything about it. (Not the ethical way to promote it, I know, but I'm just telling you how it is) People don't fear virtualization People don't spend too much time discussing over discussions, they lose focus amidst all the FUD People don't let competitors confuse THEM while spreading FUD. note: Remember FUD spreaders don't necessarily have to come from within, they can be external elements People really aren't afraid of change One large financial services firm configured its own server, locked it down and delivered it to iQor to run. “And don’t touch it," the client ordered, according to Sabatelli. “What I did in that instance was convert the physical box over to a virtual box without their knowledge," Sabatelli recounted during a VMware customer panel at the VMworld 2007 this week. “They came back later and asked, ’Is everything OK with the box?’"...

Brocade®, the leader in networked storage solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, will be at this week's VMworld 2007 Conference in San Francisco, California, delivering two presentations on the evolving role of Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies in VMware environments. The lineup of Brocade speakers, alongside Brocade experts in Booth #221, will provide attending IT professionals with best practices and new approaches for leveraging virtualization tools to meet growing business data management requirements. VMworld offers a forum for industry leaders to present and discuss the latest trends and advances in virtualization technology. The Brocade sessions will demonstrate the value of hardware storage initiators in a virtual server environment and how Brocade server connectivity and Brocade Access Gateway solutions provide the most efficient model for blade server virtual environments. Brocade Sessions at VMworld 2007 include: Event: VMworld, San F...

And loads of other winners and runner-ups. Bridget reports: In the Data Protection and Security category, the gold went to Symantec Corp.'s NetBackup 6.5 for its tight and elegant integration with VMware Consolidated Backup, or VCB. Finalists include Cupertino, Calif.-based Blue Lane Technologies Inc. for VirtualShield and Boulder, Colo.-based LeftHand Networks Inc. for its Virtual SAN Appliance. Check out the whole list.

This is an interesting multi-part series of setting up exchange on VMware. If you have read my previous article [here] about some of the initial thoughts that I have had about the migration, you will have seen that I plan to use a method called “Bunny Hopping” – essentially as I have financial constraints on this migration (e.g I have to use my existing hardware) I have purchased a server which I intend to add into my Exchange organization and then move the mailboxes from one cluster onto it – then re blow the old clusters with Windows 2003 x64 and Exchange 2007 then move the mailboxes back – then repeat the process for the other clusters (long winded I know but the Organisation is not prepared to replace what was £70,000 of new hardware 24 months ago and I can kind of see the reasoning). Excellent multi-part series! Why I like it? Its detailed It has tips and advices It has print screens here and there Strongly advised to check this out. Part 1 and Part2 .