Virtualization has quickly evolved into a strategic enabling technology now widely deployed at all levels of the IT stack – from servers and desktops to networks, storage and applications. However, with rising data volumes, lack of cross-domain visibility, and shifting data center roles and responsibilities, today’s virtual environments require more proactive management to maximize the business value of virtualization investments. With even greater growth projected in 2010, Hyper9, Inc. recommends five virtualization management strategies to get the most from your virtual infrastructure:
Top Tips for Optimizing Virtual Environments
1) Minimize VM Sprawl: VM sprawl – characterized by issues such as suspended VMs, VMs that are powered on but not being used, orphaned files, redundant snapshots, out of compliance software licenses and thin provisioning – is wreaking havoc on IT organizations, leading to escalating costs and inefficiencies in virtual environments. Solutions that provide deep inspection and holistic correlation of performance, configuration and historical data across the virtual infrastructure (VMs, VCs, hosts, guests and clusters) can help administrators address operational inefficiencies head-on, minimizing VM sprawl while protecting and increasing virtualization ROI.
2) Understand Storage Parameters: At any given time, organizations need to understand how much disk space is available including which data stores are filling up and how quickly storage is being consumed. Where the focus used to be on acquiring more servers, virtualization has now shifted it to acquiring more storage resources. Dynamic reporting tools that track and alert on thousands of properties in the virtual environment can help administrators ensure proper resource allocations, or make proactive management decisions before key thresholds have been reached. Having visibility into storage bottlenecks becomes even more critical as virtualization moves beyond low hanging fruit applications to supporting the rollout of business-critical applications.
3) Pinpoint Interdependencies: Constant change, blurred boundaries and an inherent state of mobility make it increasingly difficult to pinpoint virtualization breakdowns by source, criticality and interdependency. Tools that provide broad insights across the virtual infrastructure, applications and storage can help organizations prioritize the right management actions at the right time in highly dynamic virtual environments.
4) Tie the Business Back to the Infrastructure: The up-stack migration of virtualization is driving the need to establish better business context around virtual resources – specifically, how they support the delivery of critical applications and services, as well as map to business units, departments and users. Solutions that track global trends around how resources are used, configured and changed over time; that perform capacity planning and troubleshoot performance across infrastructures and applications; and that understand the breakdown of VM and host configurations sorted by labels (departments or lines of business) can help administrators improve visibility, collaboration, control and reporting around business-level management issues.
5) Integrate into Larger Datacenter Strategy: Implementing a successful virtualization strategy depends on being able to leverage open APIs (including PowerShell and Perl) to integrate with existing management consoles, CMDBs, service desk solutions and analytics tools that drive automation workflows across the environment. Additionally, tools that can show the real-time impact of changing resource allocations and usage – from how many VMs have been added in the last week, to who owns the VMs and how are they being used – can help administrators become more efficient and cost-effective in their planning and investment strategies.
“This past year brought significant advancements in virtualization, but organizations are just scratching the surface in terms of what they can achieve,” said Bill Kennedy, CEO at Hyper9. “As we look to the New Year, it’s important to remember that certain basic principles will always apply to a successful virtualization strategy – no matter how small or expansive that initiative might be.”
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
VMware Lowers Operational Cost With Most Advanced Virtualization and Management Solutions
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced independent research convincingly proves that VMware customers are drastically lowering operational expenditures (OpEx) with VMware solutions. VMware vSphere™ and the VMware vCenter™ Product Family lower the day-to-day costs of running IT, enabling IT resources and budgets to be shifted from tactical maintenance to strategic projects that can better create value for the business. "Reducing OpEx with Virtualization and Virtual Systems Management," a whitepaper prepared by ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) for VMware, quantifies how customers have been able to reduce service failures, improve staff efficiency, speed up service deployment and reduce facility operation costs using VMware solutions.
The whitepaper, which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:
Reduction of Service Failures - fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
Improved Staff Efficiency - increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
Faster Service Deployment - allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
Reduced Facility Operation Costs - allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter
"VMware's ability to help customers dramatically reduce CapEx in the datacenter is well understood, and has been leveraged by hundreds of thousands of customers," said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware. "It is OpEx cost reductions that have been the unsung heroes of virtualization. This new research finds that customers are increasingly adopting VMware precisely for OpEx cost reductions derived from superior high availability, disaster recovery and operations management."
"OpEx savings remains one of the most strategic opportunities for customers because it offers the potential to rebalance the cost structure of IT, shifting budgets from ongoing maintenance to innovation and business value," said Andi Mann, vice president, research, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "VMware vSphere™ enables customers to drive OpEx down through its sophisticated platform, enabling high performance and increased virtual machine densities and advanced features enabling availability and enhanced management. In developing a model for identifying, capturing and measuring OpEx improvements, we hope to provide customers with a valuable tool in achieving this critical business improvement."
The EMA whitepaper also highlights how VMware virtualization and management enable Tucson Electric Power, Attachmate and George Washington University to reduce OpEx cost and do more with existing staff.
"We are growing at a net of 40 servers per year over the last five years and 100 percent storage growth year over year, yet we have been able to accommodate that growth, to triple our workload, without adding a single resource in five years," said Chris Rima, supervisor of IT infrastructure systems, UniSource Energy Corporation and its subsidiary Tucson Electric Power (TEP). "The main hours you save from virtualization are on operational and disaster recovery tasks."
"We've been able to do more with the same staff, and it has really increased productivity," said Raoul Gabiam, IT operations and engineering manager, George Washington University. EMA estimates that virtualization with VMware has reduced or avoided operational costs at around $400,000 each year for George Washington University. "But it is not about us. It is about the customers, the university, their needs -- we have been able to meet their needs, add programs before school starts, even in a window that might be unrealistic on physical hosts."
The whitepaper, which includes EMA research and VMware customer case studies, documents how VMware virtualization enables:
Reduction of Service Failures - fixing problems up to 24 times faster, eliminating up to 43 hours of downtime a year, improving uptime to as high as 99.999 percent, to reduce the impact, frequency, duration, and cost of service issues, troubleshooting, out-of-hours support, and productivity loss
Improved Staff Efficiency - increasing administrator efficiency by an average of 10 percent, and as much as 270 percent, by allowing a single administrator to manage up to 1,800 servers, reducing annual management costs by up to $1,000 per server
Faster Service Deployment - allowing new systems to be deployed up to 240 times faster, and new applications up to 96 times faster, saving almost $2,000 in wage costs alone per deployment, while reducing downtime, and improving time-to-market for new products and services
Reduced Facility Operation Costs - allowing approximately half of all organizations studied to reduce both floor space/rent costs, and power consumption, the latter by an average of 16 percent, or around $700,000 per year for a 5 megawatt datacenter
"VMware's ability to help customers dramatically reduce CapEx in the datacenter is well understood, and has been leveraged by hundreds of thousands of customers," said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware. "It is OpEx cost reductions that have been the unsung heroes of virtualization. This new research finds that customers are increasingly adopting VMware precisely for OpEx cost reductions derived from superior high availability, disaster recovery and operations management."
"OpEx savings remains one of the most strategic opportunities for customers because it offers the potential to rebalance the cost structure of IT, shifting budgets from ongoing maintenance to innovation and business value," said Andi Mann, vice president, research, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. "VMware vSphere™ enables customers to drive OpEx down through its sophisticated platform, enabling high performance and increased virtual machine densities and advanced features enabling availability and enhanced management. In developing a model for identifying, capturing and measuring OpEx improvements, we hope to provide customers with a valuable tool in achieving this critical business improvement."
The EMA whitepaper also highlights how VMware virtualization and management enable Tucson Electric Power, Attachmate and George Washington University to reduce OpEx cost and do more with existing staff.
"We are growing at a net of 40 servers per year over the last five years and 100 percent storage growth year over year, yet we have been able to accommodate that growth, to triple our workload, without adding a single resource in five years," said Chris Rima, supervisor of IT infrastructure systems, UniSource Energy Corporation and its subsidiary Tucson Electric Power (TEP). "The main hours you save from virtualization are on operational and disaster recovery tasks."
"We've been able to do more with the same staff, and it has really increased productivity," said Raoul Gabiam, IT operations and engineering manager, George Washington University. EMA estimates that virtualization with VMware has reduced or avoided operational costs at around $400,000 each year for George Washington University. "But it is not about us. It is about the customers, the university, their needs -- we have been able to meet their needs, add programs before school starts, even in a window that might be unrealistic on physical hosts."
Surgient CTO Talks Cloud and Virtualization Patents with VMblog
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Surgient's CTO, Dave Malcolm, to talk about virtualization and the cloud. Surgient has been working with both technologies since 2001, long before most other companies out there, and even longer before the word "cloud" was coined as a term that most of us were willing to talk about in the field or within the media.
And because Surgient has been involved in both of these cutting edge and emerging technologies for so many years now, they've been fortunate as a company to file for and receive granted status on a couple of very interesting and key patents in this market. Here is part of our discussion:
VMblog: In addition to offering virtualization lab management software and providing software for managing the cloud, you guys have also filed and received quite a few patents around "cloud technology." Can you tell us a little bit about the most recent cloud patent granted? Can you summarize it and tell us what it involves?
Surgient: Certainly. Our most recent granted patent, entitled, "Virtual server cloud interfacing," addresses the concept of federated cloud management. It defines the creation and management of multiple architectures of federated virtual server clouds: Inter-Clouds, Extra-Clouds, Super-Clouds, and Exchange Clouds.
The patent defines the management mechanisms for moving, cloning, activating, de-activating, and resource-balancing virtual servers across all four federated cloud architectures. Additionally, the patent describes the process for "follow-the-sun" virtual server activation and de-activation across multiple federated clouds.
This is a broad patent covering a wide range of management and automation mechanisms across four distinct federated cloud architectures.
Patent Details:
US Patent #7574496: Virtual Server Cloud Interfacing
Issued 8/11/2009, Filed 4/17/2002
VMblog: You have some other cloud related patents, don't you? Can you tell us about those as well?
Surgient: Yes, the US Patent Office has granted Surgient six patents on our virtualization and cloud automation technology. I'll describe a few of them here...
The first defines the general principles of virtual server cloud management, and is entitled, "Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources." This patent, granted in April 2005, covers the creation of a cloud of virtualized infrastructure and the management mechanisms for the virtual server cloud, including maintaining status information, managing access control, managing resources for virtual and physical servers, server cloning, and the movement of virtual servers across physical infrastructure.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,880,002: Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources
Issued 4/12/2005, Filed 3/18/2002
Additionally, we hold Patent #6,990,666, which covers the dynamic resource management model. The patent defines virtual infrastructure resource allocation management for cost and performance optimization, priority-based scheduling, and over-subscription.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,990,666: Near on-line server
Issued 1/24/2006, Filed 7/25/2002
VMblog: How important do you believe patents are in today's IT world? And do you continue to work on new and interesting patents today?
At Surgient, we believe innovation is important. We strive to create and maintain a culture of technology innovation, and as such, we continue to make investments in cutting-edge technologies. Patents are a way for us to protect our innovations and to build additional value for our business by reinforcing our technology vision and leadership. As we develop new and innovative technologies, we continue to protect those investments through the patent process, so yes, we are constantly evaluating our inventions and determining which of those need to be protected.
VMblog: It seems like there are some technologies out there that may fall under your patents. What happens here?
What I'll say here is that Surgient has been pioneering cloud automation and management technologies longer than anyone in the industry. We've been an innovator, and that innovation has been reinforced by the granting of these patents by the US Patent Office. Because we've come from cloud roots, our solution is truly a purpose-built platform designed for managing clouds. The Surgient Platform provides the shortest time to value and most advanced technology for managing enterprise private clouds.
And because Surgient has been involved in both of these cutting edge and emerging technologies for so many years now, they've been fortunate as a company to file for and receive granted status on a couple of very interesting and key patents in this market. Here is part of our discussion:
VMblog: In addition to offering virtualization lab management software and providing software for managing the cloud, you guys have also filed and received quite a few patents around "cloud technology." Can you tell us a little bit about the most recent cloud patent granted? Can you summarize it and tell us what it involves?
Surgient: Certainly. Our most recent granted patent, entitled, "Virtual server cloud interfacing," addresses the concept of federated cloud management. It defines the creation and management of multiple architectures of federated virtual server clouds: Inter-Clouds, Extra-Clouds, Super-Clouds, and Exchange Clouds.
The patent defines the management mechanisms for moving, cloning, activating, de-activating, and resource-balancing virtual servers across all four federated cloud architectures. Additionally, the patent describes the process for "follow-the-sun" virtual server activation and de-activation across multiple federated clouds.
This is a broad patent covering a wide range of management and automation mechanisms across four distinct federated cloud architectures.
Patent Details:
US Patent #7574496: Virtual Server Cloud Interfacing
Issued 8/11/2009, Filed 4/17/2002
VMblog: You have some other cloud related patents, don't you? Can you tell us about those as well?
Surgient: Yes, the US Patent Office has granted Surgient six patents on our virtualization and cloud automation technology. I'll describe a few of them here...
The first defines the general principles of virtual server cloud management, and is entitled, "Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources." This patent, granted in April 2005, covers the creation of a cloud of virtualized infrastructure and the management mechanisms for the virtual server cloud, including maintaining status information, managing access control, managing resources for virtual and physical servers, server cloning, and the movement of virtual servers across physical infrastructure.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,880,002: Virtualized logical server cloud providing non-deterministic allocation of logical attributes of logical servers to physical resources
Issued 4/12/2005, Filed 3/18/2002
Additionally, we hold Patent #6,990,666, which covers the dynamic resource management model. The patent defines virtual infrastructure resource allocation management for cost and performance optimization, priority-based scheduling, and over-subscription.
Patent Details:
US Patent #6,990,666: Near on-line server
Issued 1/24/2006, Filed 7/25/2002
VMblog: How important do you believe patents are in today's IT world? And do you continue to work on new and interesting patents today?
At Surgient, we believe innovation is important. We strive to create and maintain a culture of technology innovation, and as such, we continue to make investments in cutting-edge technologies. Patents are a way for us to protect our innovations and to build additional value for our business by reinforcing our technology vision and leadership. As we develop new and innovative technologies, we continue to protect those investments through the patent process, so yes, we are constantly evaluating our inventions and determining which of those need to be protected.
VMblog: It seems like there are some technologies out there that may fall under your patents. What happens here?
What I'll say here is that Surgient has been pioneering cloud automation and management technologies longer than anyone in the industry. We've been an innovator, and that innovation has been reinforced by the granting of these patents by the US Patent Office. Because we've come from cloud roots, our solution is truly a purpose-built platform designed for managing clouds. The Surgient Platform provides the shortest time to value and most advanced technology for managing enterprise private clouds.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Homecare Homebase Counts on DataCore Storage Virtualization to Pool Storage, Ensure High Availability and Support an Entire Virtual Environment
DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced yet another trailblazing customer – Homecare Homebase (HCHB) – that has met its most mission-critical business objectives through storage virtualization. With co-location sites in both the Dallas as well as Louisville metro areas, the HCHB IT team now uses DataCore to manage eight (8) terabytes at each site. There is an “Active-Active” architecture in place, whereby Dallas and Louisville-based customers run HCHB’s hosted application and also synchronize their data to each site across the Internet everyday. The system that DataCore supports in terms of backend storage currently supports over 15,000 concurrent users.
HCHB empowers the homecare and hospice industry to be more effective in providing healthcare to patients. Currently 4,375 office workers and over 11,000 field agents rely on applications running on HCHB’s IT systems infrastructure. Everything HCHB customers do is mobile and all of the applications HCHB offers these agents in the homecare industry are both mobile and real-time. “The combination of the VMware platform along with the DataCore SAN has really given us a lot of flexibility to more rapidly deploy consistent images of systems – especially in the Citrix farm,” explained Chris Kane, director of technical operations, Homecare Homebase. “In addition, the VMware-DataCore combination has given us much improved VMotion capability – where the SAN enables us to do maintenance on the host in the middle of the day, if we have to.”
Streamlining homecare and hospice efficiency
As part of the healthcare industry in general and supporting homecare and hospice specifically, HCHB’s customers benefit from the company’s hosted applications. They do so through two mechanisms offered by HCHB. One is the Citrix thin client space that HCHB hosts out of its Dallas and Louisville sites. The other is a Windows mobile device application called PointCare. HCHB agents and branch office users use these Citrix-powered applications to do scheduling, billing and reporting. The mobile agents that use those branch offices as their home base enter data in real-time on the mobile device, which is synchronized up to HCHB’s hosted synchronization severs at either site. “We at HCHB help our customers to provide better care for their patients,” said Kane. “Our customers’ caregivers are able to completely document their home health and hospice visits while they are caring for those patients – it is all done in real-time, on-the-spot.”
In terms of storage, before the DataCore SAN was introduced at both HCHB locations (Dallas and Louisville), the company was using a lot of local storage – scattered across many different systems. It had a couple of NAS (network attached storage) units that were in place – specifically Adaptec snap units, which had been working for some time. These were synchronizing data between both locations across a private connection. “We quickly outgrew the storage we had – both in terms of the amount of space presented by those units as well as the performance of those units,” noted Kane.
HCHB is a very big Microsoft SQL Server shop and tended to back-up all of its customer information using these snap units at each site to replicate for disaster recovery purposes. According to Kane, the units were just not able to keep up with the back-up planning and also the synchronization of the data. “The storage we had before DataCore became troublesome,” commented Kane. “We were in desperate need, not only of space, but also of reliable storage.”
DataCore partner The Mirazon Group served as a trusted IT advisor to HCHB in the selection process, helping HCHB review suitable SAN solutions, particularly Compellent and DataCore. On its own, HCHB looked at EqualLogic from Dell, LeftHand from HP, as well as EMC and NetApp. Noted Kane, “The DataCore SAN solution suits our IT administrative style better than the other solutions we saw. The more we looked at traditional SAN solutions – encompassing hardware, software and professional services – for us, these weren’t the type of solutions that we have typically dealt with. We have a lot of skilled technology people in house and we like to be able to get our hands on every piece of technology we bring in. The fact that DataCore is Windows-based gives us a little more control – particularly being able to manage the hardware ourselves. Moreover, DataCore gave us a full, high availability solution. Not to mention that DataCore is very competitive price-wise – so all of this made DataCore the best choice for us.”
A more consistent environment for customers + seamless maintenance for administrators
HCHB has two high-availability (HA) SANmelody™ pairs at both co-location sites. The company has full HA on all of the storage. There is a mixture of direct-attached storage (DAS) on its Supermicro SAN nodes, which connects through a Fibre Channel connection to additional Xiotech storage from an Emprise 5000. The DataCore SAN is fully dedicated for HCHB’s virtual environment. In terms of virtual infrastructure, HCHB is a VMware vSphere shop. All the virtual servers running within the VMware virtual infrastructure are plugged into the SAN. HCHB has also replaced its Citrix application tier and replacing all of its physical, Citrix “pizza boxes” with virtual machines. Future plans include hosting SQL databases on the SAN in 2010.
Virtualizing the Citrix environment with VMware and DataCore running in tandem has provided a real, tangible benefit in terms of system maintenance and administration. Before – with the physical, Citrix environment, the IT team at HCHB was very limited in terms of what they could do with those systems during the working day. “Just the patch management aspect of keeping up with all the physical boxes has been greatly improved in the virtual environment because we can deploy patch templates versus having to constantly update from Microsoft or other vendors,” added Kane.
Real benefit – for customers and for system engineers
With the SAN in place, the virtual environment at HCHB has delivered real benefits to customers and system administrators alike. These benefits are a direct result of the improvements made possible through these new virtualization capabilities. For instance, HCHB as a whole is able to roll out new services more rapidly and consistently. Moreover, the current databases and applications that HCHB uses internally to run its business, such as file servers (documentation that support internal needs) or Microsoft Office Sharepoint (that supports customers), have benefited – either directly or indirectly – from the VMware virtual infrastructure and the DataCore storage virtualization SAN.
In all, HCHB has 75 virtual machines running within the virtual infrastructure in Dallas and all are actively providing services. At the Louisville site, HCHB has 125 VMs online. At both locations, HCHB has duplicated both its storage and its SAN nodes. DataCore runs on Supermicro servers, mirrored to the same hardware at each location. Xiotech Emprise 5000 units have been added for growth and are connected via Fibre Channel to each SAN server at each location.
“It has been very rapid growth for us recently,” summarized Kane. “And I am very, very happy with the performance we are getting both out of VMware and the DataCore SAN at this point. The SAN has made a world of difference to us. There were many choices for a SAN – from a variety of SAN vendors. For us, DataCore was the right fit. DataCore gives us the ability to select and maintain the hardware of our own choice. It gives us the ability to have a fully redundant, highly available SAN – not just at the controller-level, but at the storage-level itself. That, combined with the price point DataCore’s portable SAN software offers – even when having to purchase hardware and licensing – is still much more effective than anything else we found on the market.”
About Homecare Homebase, LP
Homecare Homebase is a privately held software development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1999 by industry veterans, Homecare Homebase offers a comprehensive integrated web-based software solution to improve the clinical, operational and financial success of homecare and hospice agencies. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.hchb.com or contact us toll free at 1-866-535-HCHB (4242).
HCHB empowers the homecare and hospice industry to be more effective in providing healthcare to patients. Currently 4,375 office workers and over 11,000 field agents rely on applications running on HCHB’s IT systems infrastructure. Everything HCHB customers do is mobile and all of the applications HCHB offers these agents in the homecare industry are both mobile and real-time. “The combination of the VMware platform along with the DataCore SAN has really given us a lot of flexibility to more rapidly deploy consistent images of systems – especially in the Citrix farm,” explained Chris Kane, director of technical operations, Homecare Homebase. “In addition, the VMware-DataCore combination has given us much improved VMotion capability – where the SAN enables us to do maintenance on the host in the middle of the day, if we have to.”
Streamlining homecare and hospice efficiency
As part of the healthcare industry in general and supporting homecare and hospice specifically, HCHB’s customers benefit from the company’s hosted applications. They do so through two mechanisms offered by HCHB. One is the Citrix thin client space that HCHB hosts out of its Dallas and Louisville sites. The other is a Windows mobile device application called PointCare. HCHB agents and branch office users use these Citrix-powered applications to do scheduling, billing and reporting. The mobile agents that use those branch offices as their home base enter data in real-time on the mobile device, which is synchronized up to HCHB’s hosted synchronization severs at either site. “We at HCHB help our customers to provide better care for their patients,” said Kane. “Our customers’ caregivers are able to completely document their home health and hospice visits while they are caring for those patients – it is all done in real-time, on-the-spot.”
In terms of storage, before the DataCore SAN was introduced at both HCHB locations (Dallas and Louisville), the company was using a lot of local storage – scattered across many different systems. It had a couple of NAS (network attached storage) units that were in place – specifically Adaptec snap units, which had been working for some time. These were synchronizing data between both locations across a private connection. “We quickly outgrew the storage we had – both in terms of the amount of space presented by those units as well as the performance of those units,” noted Kane.
HCHB is a very big Microsoft SQL Server shop and tended to back-up all of its customer information using these snap units at each site to replicate for disaster recovery purposes. According to Kane, the units were just not able to keep up with the back-up planning and also the synchronization of the data. “The storage we had before DataCore became troublesome,” commented Kane. “We were in desperate need, not only of space, but also of reliable storage.”
DataCore partner The Mirazon Group served as a trusted IT advisor to HCHB in the selection process, helping HCHB review suitable SAN solutions, particularly Compellent and DataCore. On its own, HCHB looked at EqualLogic from Dell, LeftHand from HP, as well as EMC and NetApp. Noted Kane, “The DataCore SAN solution suits our IT administrative style better than the other solutions we saw. The more we looked at traditional SAN solutions – encompassing hardware, software and professional services – for us, these weren’t the type of solutions that we have typically dealt with. We have a lot of skilled technology people in house and we like to be able to get our hands on every piece of technology we bring in. The fact that DataCore is Windows-based gives us a little more control – particularly being able to manage the hardware ourselves. Moreover, DataCore gave us a full, high availability solution. Not to mention that DataCore is very competitive price-wise – so all of this made DataCore the best choice for us.”
A more consistent environment for customers + seamless maintenance for administrators
HCHB has two high-availability (HA) SANmelody™ pairs at both co-location sites. The company has full HA on all of the storage. There is a mixture of direct-attached storage (DAS) on its Supermicro SAN nodes, which connects through a Fibre Channel connection to additional Xiotech storage from an Emprise 5000. The DataCore SAN is fully dedicated for HCHB’s virtual environment. In terms of virtual infrastructure, HCHB is a VMware vSphere shop. All the virtual servers running within the VMware virtual infrastructure are plugged into the SAN. HCHB has also replaced its Citrix application tier and replacing all of its physical, Citrix “pizza boxes” with virtual machines. Future plans include hosting SQL databases on the SAN in 2010.
Virtualizing the Citrix environment with VMware and DataCore running in tandem has provided a real, tangible benefit in terms of system maintenance and administration. Before – with the physical, Citrix environment, the IT team at HCHB was very limited in terms of what they could do with those systems during the working day. “Just the patch management aspect of keeping up with all the physical boxes has been greatly improved in the virtual environment because we can deploy patch templates versus having to constantly update from Microsoft or other vendors,” added Kane.
Real benefit – for customers and for system engineers
With the SAN in place, the virtual environment at HCHB has delivered real benefits to customers and system administrators alike. These benefits are a direct result of the improvements made possible through these new virtualization capabilities. For instance, HCHB as a whole is able to roll out new services more rapidly and consistently. Moreover, the current databases and applications that HCHB uses internally to run its business, such as file servers (documentation that support internal needs) or Microsoft Office Sharepoint (that supports customers), have benefited – either directly or indirectly – from the VMware virtual infrastructure and the DataCore storage virtualization SAN.
In all, HCHB has 75 virtual machines running within the virtual infrastructure in Dallas and all are actively providing services. At the Louisville site, HCHB has 125 VMs online. At both locations, HCHB has duplicated both its storage and its SAN nodes. DataCore runs on Supermicro servers, mirrored to the same hardware at each location. Xiotech Emprise 5000 units have been added for growth and are connected via Fibre Channel to each SAN server at each location.
“It has been very rapid growth for us recently,” summarized Kane. “And I am very, very happy with the performance we are getting both out of VMware and the DataCore SAN at this point. The SAN has made a world of difference to us. There were many choices for a SAN – from a variety of SAN vendors. For us, DataCore was the right fit. DataCore gives us the ability to select and maintain the hardware of our own choice. It gives us the ability to have a fully redundant, highly available SAN – not just at the controller-level, but at the storage-level itself. That, combined with the price point DataCore’s portable SAN software offers – even when having to purchase hardware and licensing – is still much more effective than anything else we found on the market.”
About Homecare Homebase, LP
Homecare Homebase is a privately held software development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Founded in 1999 by industry veterans, Homecare Homebase offers a comprehensive integrated web-based software solution to improve the clinical, operational and financial success of homecare and hospice agencies. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.hchb.com or contact us toll free at 1-866-535-HCHB (4242).
Trend Micro Launches Broad Strategy and New Solutions for Advanced Server Security Spanning Physical, Virtualized and Cloud-Based Servers
Trend Micro is introducing an advanced server security strategy that encompasses protection for the cloud, as well as products and solutions that help corporations address the challenging data protection, security and compliance needs of today's datacenters that stretch across physical, virtualized and cloud-computing environments.
Independent research and industry analyst reports indicate 95 percent of datacenters in 2009 are employing virtualization technology and 60 percent of production virtual machines are less secure than their physical counterparts. In fact, 88 percent of North American companies do not even have a virtualization security strategy. Additionally, datacenters are facing new and sophisticated attacks every day, putting them at a greater risk of security breaches.
Trend Micro™ Deep Security, the flagship product for advanced server security at Trend Micro, introduces a new paradigm for server security where the entire server is protected, including the operating system, network and applications layers for superior and comprehensive security, regardless of computing environment, virtualization platform or storage location. It emphasizes:
Preventing data breaches and disruptions by providing a layer of defense at the server itself, whether physical, virtual or cloud.
Lowering the cost of security management for virtual and cloud computing environments.
Helping to make possible compliance over a wide range of regulations and standards, including PCI, SAS 70, FISMA, HIPAA, and more.
Addressing immediate security concerns plaguing enterprises in physical and virtual worlds such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks perpetrated by sophisticated, for-profit hackers.
"With datacenters becoming more dynamic, traditional security solutions break down due to unique challenges imposed by virtualization and the ever increasing sophistication of for-profit attackers," said Thomas Miller, executive general manager of the enterprise business unit, Trend Micro. "With cloud computing, servers, like laptops before them, are moving outside the security perimeter and can be co-located with unknown and potentially malicious servers. Trend Micro server security solutions enable protection for virtual and cloud-based servers that are susceptible to these unique risks and challenges currently not addressed by existing security solutions."
Trend Micro Deep Security provides advanced protection for servers right from the operating system to resident applications with a modular architecture that includes: A deep packet inspection engine with intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS), Web application protection and network-level application control; firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection modules. This protection is available for both physical and virtual systems using server-based software agents and, coming soon with Deep Security 7.0, using virtual security appliances specifically designed for VMware VI3 and vSphere 4 environments. Trend Micro Deep Security 7.0, the latest version, is the world's first security software that coordinates VMsafe API-based security applied at the hypervisor with additional protection on virtual machines to protect VMware environments. This version also includes new features designed to improve management and simplify compliance for a lower total cost of ownership such as: Event tagging to enable better workflow of security incident handling, the ability to create a "reference system" or known good state to reduce false positive alerts resulting from normal system updates such as patching. Other enhancements include integrity monitoring, log inspection, and SIEM integration capabilities.
Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization Implements Trend Micro Deep Security
Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization, the physician organization for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston MA, provides medical management services in support of its 1,500 members throughout eastern Massachusetts. In order to promote and improve the quality of care for all patients, it required a secure, flexible computing infrastructure, which is why it implemented a private cloud VMware virtualized environment. To further mitigate risk, BIDPO deployed Trend Micro Deep Security, which helps ensure sensitive patient data and computing applications are safe.
"We created a best practices defense-in-depth security architecture, knowing that we were going to be putting patient data on the Internet," explained Bill Gillis, director of clinical application services and technical director for the BIDMC/BIDPO EHR Joint Venture. "We really rely on the server security strategy that Trend Micro has brought to the table for us. It gives us an environment where we can bring virtualization to the forefront, to the Web, in a secure way so that we don't have to worry so much about security breaches."
Trend Micro Deep Security combines with Trend Micro™ ServerProtect™ and Core Protection™ for Virtual Machines, the company's anti-malware products designed for physical servers and VMware virtual servers respectively. This unique blend delivers layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity. Trend Micro Deep Security, with advanced anti-malware protection, further adds to Trend Micro's ability to broadly deliver layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity.
Pricing and Availability for North America
Trend Micro Deep Security 7 will be available in November 2009 with two pricing models designed to deliver maximum value to organizations. Deep Security is available for traditional physical servers on a per server basis starting at $885 per server. A virtual server license is also available for VMware environments with unlimited agents per host machine starting at $2100 per socket.
Trend Micro advanced server security solutions are part of Trend Micro™ Enterprise Security - a tightly integrated offering of content security products, services and solutions which is powered by the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™. Trend Micro Enterprise Security delivers maximum protection from emerging threats while greatly reducing the cost and complexity of security management.
Independent research and industry analyst reports indicate 95 percent of datacenters in 2009 are employing virtualization technology and 60 percent of production virtual machines are less secure than their physical counterparts. In fact, 88 percent of North American companies do not even have a virtualization security strategy. Additionally, datacenters are facing new and sophisticated attacks every day, putting them at a greater risk of security breaches.
Trend Micro™ Deep Security, the flagship product for advanced server security at Trend Micro, introduces a new paradigm for server security where the entire server is protected, including the operating system, network and applications layers for superior and comprehensive security, regardless of computing environment, virtualization platform or storage location. It emphasizes:
Preventing data breaches and disruptions by providing a layer of defense at the server itself, whether physical, virtual or cloud.
Lowering the cost of security management for virtual and cloud computing environments.
Helping to make possible compliance over a wide range of regulations and standards, including PCI, SAS 70, FISMA, HIPAA, and more.
Addressing immediate security concerns plaguing enterprises in physical and virtual worlds such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks perpetrated by sophisticated, for-profit hackers.
"With datacenters becoming more dynamic, traditional security solutions break down due to unique challenges imposed by virtualization and the ever increasing sophistication of for-profit attackers," said Thomas Miller, executive general manager of the enterprise business unit, Trend Micro. "With cloud computing, servers, like laptops before them, are moving outside the security perimeter and can be co-located with unknown and potentially malicious servers. Trend Micro server security solutions enable protection for virtual and cloud-based servers that are susceptible to these unique risks and challenges currently not addressed by existing security solutions."
Trend Micro Deep Security provides advanced protection for servers right from the operating system to resident applications with a modular architecture that includes: A deep packet inspection engine with intrusion detection/prevention (IDS/IPS), Web application protection and network-level application control; firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection modules. This protection is available for both physical and virtual systems using server-based software agents and, coming soon with Deep Security 7.0, using virtual security appliances specifically designed for VMware VI3 and vSphere 4 environments. Trend Micro Deep Security 7.0, the latest version, is the world's first security software that coordinates VMsafe API-based security applied at the hypervisor with additional protection on virtual machines to protect VMware environments. This version also includes new features designed to improve management and simplify compliance for a lower total cost of ownership such as: Event tagging to enable better workflow of security incident handling, the ability to create a "reference system" or known good state to reduce false positive alerts resulting from normal system updates such as patching. Other enhancements include integrity monitoring, log inspection, and SIEM integration capabilities.
Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization Implements Trend Micro Deep Security
Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization, the physician organization for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston MA, provides medical management services in support of its 1,500 members throughout eastern Massachusetts. In order to promote and improve the quality of care for all patients, it required a secure, flexible computing infrastructure, which is why it implemented a private cloud VMware virtualized environment. To further mitigate risk, BIDPO deployed Trend Micro Deep Security, which helps ensure sensitive patient data and computing applications are safe.
"We created a best practices defense-in-depth security architecture, knowing that we were going to be putting patient data on the Internet," explained Bill Gillis, director of clinical application services and technical director for the BIDMC/BIDPO EHR Joint Venture. "We really rely on the server security strategy that Trend Micro has brought to the table for us. It gives us an environment where we can bring virtualization to the forefront, to the Web, in a secure way so that we don't have to worry so much about security breaches."
Trend Micro Deep Security combines with Trend Micro™ ServerProtect™ and Core Protection™ for Virtual Machines, the company's anti-malware products designed for physical servers and VMware virtual servers respectively. This unique blend delivers layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity. Trend Micro Deep Security, with advanced anti-malware protection, further adds to Trend Micro's ability to broadly deliver layered and comprehensive server security now vital to business continuity.
Pricing and Availability for North America
Trend Micro Deep Security 7 will be available in November 2009 with two pricing models designed to deliver maximum value to organizations. Deep Security is available for traditional physical servers on a per server basis starting at $885 per server. A virtual server license is also available for VMware environments with unlimited agents per host machine starting at $2100 per socket.
Trend Micro advanced server security solutions are part of Trend Micro™ Enterprise Security - a tightly integrated offering of content security products, services and solutions which is powered by the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™. Trend Micro Enterprise Security delivers maximum protection from emerging threats while greatly reducing the cost and complexity of security management.
CA Introduces New and Enhanced Solutions to Help Customers Gain Greater Return from Virtualized Environments
CA, Inc. today announced 12 new and updated Enterprise IT Management products that will help enterprises and service providers gain increased business value from virtualized environments. CA’s solutions allow organizations to realize greater cost savings, efficiency and flexibility from virtualized computing environments through comprehensive capabilities for IT management, governance, automation and security.
“CA Enterprise IT Management customers can achieve a balance between control and business agility when managing virtualized resources and systems,” said Ajei Gopal, CA’s executive vice president of products and technology. “CA solutions build on the management capabilities within popular virtualization platforms, but then extend those with enterprise-class, heterogeneous management for improved overall business results.”
Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualization, with 31 percent of operating system instances virtualized in 2008 and growing to 54 percent in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision makers in North America and Europe, conducted Forrester Research, Inc.* By simplifying and automating the management of virtualized and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualization more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology for virtualization, including solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.
“Enterprise customers building VMware-based virtualized infrastructures can achieve higher levels of cross-infrastructure visibility and automation with CA’s complementary management solutions,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. “CA and VMware’s management solutions present a compelling combination for joint customers to maximize the return on their virtualization investments and enable further expansion of their virtual infrastructure.”
New and Enhanced Products from CA Help Reduce the Business Risks and Increase the Benefits of Virtualization
New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:
NEW: CA Spectrum Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualization of infrastructure in the context of IT services; a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.
CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralized application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualization deployments and enable quicker server recovery. It will also features extended support across VMware vSphere™, Citrix Xen™, IBM LPAR, Sun Solaris™ and other platforms for centralized management of heterogeneous environments—helping to improve cost efficiency, agility, service quality, and mitigating IT and business risk.
CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA’s virtualization management capabilities.
CA Insight™ Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2® for Linux®, UNIX® and Windows®; Oracle; SQL Server® and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments—even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion™—without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter™ Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for “at-a-glance” problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.
“Acxiom® is planning to use CA Spectrum Automation Manager in combination with other Acxiom technology assets to manage an internal cloud that increases IT efficiency and drives down cost,” said David Guzmán, vice president and chief information officer of Acxiom. “CA Spectrum Automation Manager will help Acxiom continue to deliver quality services while optimizing existing resources across our pool of servers by automatically provisioning/de-provisioning physical and virtual servers within our internal grid.”
In additional announcements last week and today, CA announced other new and updated products that help improve the management of virtualized environments, including:
Security and Compliance
CA Access Control 12.5 with new features to deliver comprehensive privileged user management and enhanced host access control;
Improved integration of CA Identity Manager 12.5 and CA Role & Compliance Manager 12.5 for more streamlined identity lifecycle management, including innovative Smart Provisioning capabilities;
CA DLP 12.0 with extended discovery, protection, and control of sensitive data, and new integrations to complementary solutions;
CA Records Manager 12.6 with additional features for information governance and content protection, as well as addressing compliance demands; and
CA Governance, Risk & Compliance Manager 2.5 (CA GRC Manager) with new features to further strengthen its role as the primary platform for management of IT risk and compliance information and initiatives.
Governance
CA Clarity Project and Portfolio Management helps IT to make strategic decisions about how resources are deployed and what can and should be virtualized for greater return. New features available in CA Clarity PPM On Demand enhance the ease of use, simplify reporting, leverage industry best practices and allow for quick access to critical portfolio information.
Energy and Sustainability Management
NEW: CA ecoMeter and CA ecoGovernance help enterprises to manage global sustainability initiatives, measure and report on energy and natural resource consumption, and help reduce energy costs across the datacenter and facilities. With these new solutions, customers can reliably monitor and track their energy savings from server virtualization.
Services and Support
CA also announced today new rapid implementation offerings for CA Spectrum Automation Manager and CA Spectrum Assurance. Rapid implementations are pre-packaged, fixed-price services and education that provide the experience, best practices and expertise that can ensure a fast and successful implementation.
CA’s new enhanced support maintenance tiers, CA Business Critical Support Plus and CA Business Critical Support Premier, help customers to increase their productivity with personalized support services and product training, including designated engineers who understand the impact of CA’s virtualization management solutions on their business.
Visit CA to learn more about CA’s EITM products, services, education and support that help customers get greater return from virtualization.
“CA Enterprise IT Management customers can achieve a balance between control and business agility when managing virtualized resources and systems,” said Ajei Gopal, CA’s executive vice president of products and technology. “CA solutions build on the management capabilities within popular virtualization platforms, but then extend those with enterprise-class, heterogeneous management for improved overall business results.”
Enterprises are increasingly relying on virtualization, with 31 percent of operating system instances virtualized in 2008 and growing to 54 percent in 2010, according to an independent survey of hardware decision makers in North America and Europe, conducted Forrester Research, Inc.* By simplifying and automating the management of virtualized and physical environments, CA helps customers to reduce business risks and deploy virtualization more rapidly and confidently in their heterogeneous production environments. Unlike many other providers, CA has specifically architected its technology for virtualization, including solutions for infrastructure management, service management, application performance management, business-driven automation and security management.
“Enterprise customers building VMware-based virtualized infrastructures can achieve higher levels of cross-infrastructure visibility and automation with CA’s complementary management solutions,” said Shekar Ayyar, vice president, infrastructure alliances, VMware. “CA and VMware’s management solutions present a compelling combination for joint customers to maximize the return on their virtualization investments and enable further expansion of their virtual infrastructure.”
New and Enhanced Products from CA Help Reduce the Business Risks and Increase the Benefits of Virtualization
New and enhanced products announced today for enterprises and service providers include the following solutions for Infrastructure Management and Business-Driven Automation:
NEW: CA Spectrum Service Assurance is designed to offer a single pane of glass to display the impact of the physical and virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. This CA innovation improves IT service quality and predictability by pinpointing the root cause of quality problems and risks to quality. It can also help lower IT costs by reducing trouble-shooting and speeding mean-time-to-repair. The product is designed to provide superior visualization of infrastructure in the context of IT services; a fast, flexible and accurate way to build end-to-end service models; automated analytics to help fix quality problems and proactively reduce risk; clear service reports for making good management decisions and for communicating better with business stakeholders; and integration with the most powerful, scalable domain managers to retrieve infrastructure, application performance and root cause information.
CA Spectrum Automation Manager r11.7 is designed to help customers streamline their IT processes through centralized application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. This new version includes rapid physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) server provisioning to help simplify the adoption and expansion of virtualization deployments and enable quicker server recovery. It will also features extended support across VMware vSphere™, Citrix Xen™, IBM LPAR, Sun Solaris™ and other platforms for centralized management of heterogeneous environments—helping to improve cost efficiency, agility, service quality, and mitigating IT and business risk.
CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2 is designed to proactively monitor the performance of data and voice networks, physical and virtual systems, databases, and client/server applications across physical and virtual environments. This new version is designed to discover VMware and other virtual environments, collect important metrics needed to maintain optimum performance, be alerted when performance approaches thresholds, and view performance of the virtual infrastructure and report on the collected performance metrics to validate expected service levels. The solution is also planned to feature enhanced environmental and energy monitoring as a valuable complement to CA’s virtualization management capabilities.
CA Insight™ Database Performance Manager r11.3 is designed to proactively monitor performance (providing both real-time and historical views) across DB2® for Linux®, UNIX® and Windows®; Oracle; SQL Server® and Sybase databases, whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments. The product is designed to share this information with the other CA domain managers to provide end-to-end visibility into database health across IT. New capabilities in this version include continuous monitoring of databases in VMware environments—even across hot migrations performed using VMware VMotion™—without user interaction, as well as enhanced support for VMware performance through proactive monitoring of the VMware vCenter™ Server repository. Other planned features include integration with CA Spectrum Service Assurance; a new enterprise view for “at-a-glance” problem assessment; improved root-cause analysis of SQL performance and a unified browser-based interface for distributed and mainframe databases.
“Acxiom® is planning to use CA Spectrum Automation Manager in combination with other Acxiom technology assets to manage an internal cloud that increases IT efficiency and drives down cost,” said David Guzmán, vice president and chief information officer of Acxiom. “CA Spectrum Automation Manager will help Acxiom continue to deliver quality services while optimizing existing resources across our pool of servers by automatically provisioning/de-provisioning physical and virtual servers within our internal grid.”
In additional announcements last week and today, CA announced other new and updated products that help improve the management of virtualized environments, including:
Security and Compliance
CA Access Control 12.5 with new features to deliver comprehensive privileged user management and enhanced host access control;
Improved integration of CA Identity Manager 12.5 and CA Role & Compliance Manager 12.5 for more streamlined identity lifecycle management, including innovative Smart Provisioning capabilities;
CA DLP 12.0 with extended discovery, protection, and control of sensitive data, and new integrations to complementary solutions;
CA Records Manager 12.6 with additional features for information governance and content protection, as well as addressing compliance demands; and
CA Governance, Risk & Compliance Manager 2.5 (CA GRC Manager) with new features to further strengthen its role as the primary platform for management of IT risk and compliance information and initiatives.
Governance
CA Clarity Project and Portfolio Management helps IT to make strategic decisions about how resources are deployed and what can and should be virtualized for greater return. New features available in CA Clarity PPM On Demand enhance the ease of use, simplify reporting, leverage industry best practices and allow for quick access to critical portfolio information.
Energy and Sustainability Management
NEW: CA ecoMeter and CA ecoGovernance help enterprises to manage global sustainability initiatives, measure and report on energy and natural resource consumption, and help reduce energy costs across the datacenter and facilities. With these new solutions, customers can reliably monitor and track their energy savings from server virtualization.
Services and Support
CA also announced today new rapid implementation offerings for CA Spectrum Automation Manager and CA Spectrum Assurance. Rapid implementations are pre-packaged, fixed-price services and education that provide the experience, best practices and expertise that can ensure a fast and successful implementation.
CA’s new enhanced support maintenance tiers, CA Business Critical Support Plus and CA Business Critical Support Premier, help customers to increase their productivity with personalized support services and product training, including designated engineers who understand the impact of CA’s virtualization management solutions on their business.
Visit CA to learn more about CA’s EITM products, services, education and support that help customers get greater return from virtualization.
VMware Announces the Availability of VMware Fusion 3
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that VMware Fusion® 3 is now available. With more than 50 new features, VMware Fusion 3 makes it easier than ever to run Windows applications with Mac simplicity.
With the new built-in Migration Assistant for Windows, VMware Fusion 3 is more than two times faster than other "Switch to Mac" solutions. Users can move their entire PCs -- including applications, files documents, and settings -- to their Macs with a simple Ethernet cable, a FireWire cable, or even wirelessly.
VMware Fusion 3 includes more than 50 new features and enhancements, delivering a better-than-ever Windows on Mac experience. Key highlights include:
Performance, Finely Tuned. Support for 4-way SMP to maximize performance on the latest iMac and Mac Pro. Lower overhead and up to 2X faster resume time for a suspended virtual machine.
More Mac-Like Than Ever. Banish the start menu and launch Windows apps from the new "always-on" applications menu, even when VMware Fusion isn't running. VMware Fusion provides convenient new ways to experience Windows applications like Mac applications.
Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard's advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 will be the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 will enable users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications -- all without rebooting.
The release of VMware Fusion 3 has been widely anticipated. With more than 10,000 private beta users who have helped shape the features in the product, the VMware Fusion community is eager to upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.
"VMware Fusion gives us the best of both worlds," said Shandor Simon, director of networking services for Latin School of Chicago. "Our students, faculty and staff get easy access to the Windows-based apps they need with just a few mouse clicks. VMware Fusion proven technology made it easy to migrate our remaining Windows users to the Mac, while providing a safer, more reliable environment for our remaining Windows-based applications."
"With VMware Fusion, I have a rock stable UNIX base with the ability to run any operating system I may need, allowing me to take my complete test environment on the road," said Wil van Antwerpen, owner of Antwise Solutions, a software development company. "Now I can reproduce customer issues on alternative OSes, even when I don't have a direct internet connection to my lab. VMware Fusion 3 improves on this further by bringing Aero support for Windows onto your Mac with amazing hardware accelerated performance."
"I am a Mac devotee, but most of my clients are Windows users," said Donald Malm, who runs a consulting service. "The ease in switching between my files and my client's files when I am in Unity mode in VMware Fusion is exceptional. It allows me to stay dedicated to the Mac experience, but meet my customers' needs along the way."
"I am not a virtualization guru, in fact, I know very little about how it all works, but as an early VMware Fusion 3 user, I don't need to -- it just works," said Dale Puckett, director of operations, Brainworks Software. "At work I use a Dell laptop running 64-bit Windows 7. At night and on the weekends, VMware Fusion 3 makes it possible for me to continue my development using my iMac running Windows 7 side-by-side with Snow Leopard. And as a Microsoft developer, support for features like Windows Aero makes all the difference in the world. "
Availability and Pricing
VMware Fusion 3 is now available at the VMware online store and at authorized United States retailers for a suggested retail price of $79.99 and will be available at authorized worldwide retail locations beginning November 4.
Upgrades from previous versions of VMware Fusion to VMware Fusion 3 are now available for $39.99 at vmware.com/go/buyfusion.
With the new built-in Migration Assistant for Windows, VMware Fusion 3 is more than two times faster than other "Switch to Mac" solutions. Users can move their entire PCs -- including applications, files documents, and settings -- to their Macs with a simple Ethernet cable, a FireWire cable, or even wirelessly.
VMware Fusion 3 includes more than 50 new features and enhancements, delivering a better-than-ever Windows on Mac experience. Key highlights include:
Performance, Finely Tuned. Support for 4-way SMP to maximize performance on the latest iMac and Mac Pro. Lower overhead and up to 2X faster resume time for a suspended virtual machine.
More Mac-Like Than Ever. Banish the start menu and launch Windows apps from the new "always-on" applications menu, even when VMware Fusion isn't running. VMware Fusion provides convenient new ways to experience Windows applications like Mac applications.
Optimized for Snow Leopard. Built from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3 leverages Mac OS X Snow Leopard's advanced architecture with a new 64-bit core engine and native support for the 64-bit kernel, delivering even better Windows on Mac performance.
Ultimate Windows 7 Experience. VMware Fusion 3 will be the first to enable the full Windows 7 experience, side-by-side with your Mac, complete with Windows Aero and Flip 3D.
Best-in-Class 3D Graphics. Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 will enable users to run their favorite 3D Windows games and applications -- all without rebooting.
The release of VMware Fusion 3 has been widely anticipated. With more than 10,000 private beta users who have helped shape the features in the product, the VMware Fusion community is eager to upgrade to VMware Fusion 3.
"VMware Fusion gives us the best of both worlds," said Shandor Simon, director of networking services for Latin School of Chicago. "Our students, faculty and staff get easy access to the Windows-based apps they need with just a few mouse clicks. VMware Fusion proven technology made it easy to migrate our remaining Windows users to the Mac, while providing a safer, more reliable environment for our remaining Windows-based applications."
"With VMware Fusion, I have a rock stable UNIX base with the ability to run any operating system I may need, allowing me to take my complete test environment on the road," said Wil van Antwerpen, owner of Antwise Solutions, a software development company. "Now I can reproduce customer issues on alternative OSes, even when I don't have a direct internet connection to my lab. VMware Fusion 3 improves on this further by bringing Aero support for Windows onto your Mac with amazing hardware accelerated performance."
"I am a Mac devotee, but most of my clients are Windows users," said Donald Malm, who runs a consulting service. "The ease in switching between my files and my client's files when I am in Unity mode in VMware Fusion is exceptional. It allows me to stay dedicated to the Mac experience, but meet my customers' needs along the way."
"I am not a virtualization guru, in fact, I know very little about how it all works, but as an early VMware Fusion 3 user, I don't need to -- it just works," said Dale Puckett, director of operations, Brainworks Software. "At work I use a Dell laptop running 64-bit Windows 7. At night and on the weekends, VMware Fusion 3 makes it possible for me to continue my development using my iMac running Windows 7 side-by-side with Snow Leopard. And as a Microsoft developer, support for features like Windows Aero makes all the difference in the world. "
Availability and Pricing
VMware Fusion 3 is now available at the VMware online store and at authorized United States retailers for a suggested retail price of $79.99 and will be available at authorized worldwide retail locations beginning November 4.
Upgrades from previous versions of VMware Fusion to VMware Fusion 3 are now available for $39.99 at vmware.com/go/buyfusion.
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