Posted 02/26/10 at 07:36:48 AM by Paul Lilly

Virtualization security startup HyTrust has plenty of reason to celebrate - 10.5 million reasons, one for each dollar Cisco and several other investors have handed over to the company, InfoWorld reports.

HyTrust, winner of VMworld's "Best in Show" last year, already had $5.5 million in venture capital work with. This second round of financing almost doubles that initial infusion of cash it received from Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. 

"HyTrust continues to demonstrate the importance of this emerging market," said Eric Chiu, president and CEO of HyTrust. "Our ability to raise such a significant round of funding and attract top-tier, strategic investors in a still precarious economy is a testament to the quality of our team, the strength our offering, and the gravity of the problem that it addresses for our customers. The continued support of our customers, partners and investors is critical to our success as we continue to transform the virtualization marketplace and capitalize on the opportunities ahead of us."

HyTrust said it will use the latest round of funding to drive development, sales, and marketing, as well as "fuel the company's next stage of growth." 

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Posted 02/12/10 at 07:37:02 AM by Paul Lilly

SGI on Thursday announced the immediate availability of what it claims is the world's first large-scale, on-demand cloud computing service. Called Cyclone, the service is targeted specifically for dedicated to technical applications, SGI said.

"Cyclone enables an exciting new generation of discovery," said Dr. Michael Levine, co-founder and co-scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). "Large supercomputing centers such as ours will benefit from the ability to scale computing capacity dynamically, on-demand, and experiment with the latest technologies."

For now, SGI has committed Cyclone to supporting a "number of leading applications partners" plus five technical domains, including computation fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, computational chemistry and materials, computations biology, and ontologies.

There are two service models available, one of which is as a Software as a Service (SaaS) and the other in the form of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Availability and Pricing

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Posted 02/11/10 at 12:45:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I want to buy a new CPU, one that will support new features like hardware virtualization. Before I move to Windows 7 from Windows XP, I wish to find out if its Windows XP Mode will work for my 32-bit programs under the 64-bit version of Windows 7. Has anyone even tested this?

Read the answer to Mitch's question after the jump.

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Posted 01/27/10 at 07:30:46 AM by Paul Lilly

VMWare this week reported $608.2 million in revenue for the quarter ended December 31, 2009, representing an 18 percent increase the same quarter one year ago. It was also considerably higher than what most analysts were expecting, which had the company pegged at about $554 million.

Playing a big role in VMWare's strong quarter performance was services revenue, which catapulted 52 percent to $303.9 million. This was enough to offset declines in new licenses sales.

It wasn't all good news, though. Net income for the quarter took a steep backwards slide to $56 million, or $0.14 per share, compared to $111 million, or $0.29 per share in the same quarter one year ago. When looking at the full fiscal year, however, revenue was $2 billion, up 8 percent from $1.9 billion in 2008.

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Posted 01/14/10 at 07:06:10 AM by Paul Lilly

VMWare this week announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo. Zimbra specializes in email and collaboration software.

"Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience," said Brian Byun, VP and GM, Cloud Services, VMWare. "Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable 'cloud era' solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud."

In short, VMWare's interest in Zimbra stems from wanting help in selling cloud-computing services to businesses. At the same time, VMWare stated it plans to support existing Zimbra products and open-source projects.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, although it's believed VMWare paid far less than the $350 million Yahoo spent acquiring the company in September 2007.

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Posted 12/30/09 at 07:03:33 AM by Paul Lilly

It's been a tough year for data center managers, who have battled against a global recession for the better part of 2009 and watched as their IT budgets went in the wrong direction, particularly as demand for services ramped up. But having weathered the economic storm, the suits in charge hope 2010 brings more money to the table to devote to IT.

"They're hoping to see budgets again in 2010," said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Some dough is what they'd like. They're all for refreshing clients now that [Microsoft's Windows 7] is here, and generally shortening the average system life, but [they] have been severely constrained this year."

Whether or not data center managers get this wish remains to be seen. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide IT spending slid 5.2 percent in 2009, while enterprise spending dropped nearly 7 percent. Sure, IT spending is expected to grow by 3.3 percent in 2010, but at the same time, more than half of all CIOs surveyed said they expect their budgets to remain flat or decline in 2010.

It's not all about money, though. According to Bob Gill, an analyst with TheInfoPro, IT professionals put virtualization and cloud computing high on their wish lists.

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Posted 12/16/09 at 07:24:36 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Virtualization has become one of the biggest buzzwords in IT during the last couple of years, and for good reason. Virtualization enables you to run more than one operating system at the same time on a single system, enabling you to run legacy applications in their preferred environment. Virtualization enables you to use a single physical system to perform the jobs of two or more systems, each performing different tasks. Virtualization also enables you to create a safe "sandbox" environment for testing applications within an existing computer, so you no longer need to tie up a separate system for testing.

It's no wonder virtualization is hot. But could it become even hotter? Maximum IT columnist Mark Edward Soper takes a closer look.

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Posted 12/09/09 at 07:06:36 AM by Paul Lilly

For the next three years, Microsoft and NetApp will collaborate to deliver technology solutions in virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management, the two companies jointly announced on Tuesday.

"Microsoft is committed to driving highly scalable dynamic datacenter solutions with innovative partners like NetApp," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "Through the deeper integration of server, virtualization, management and storage technologies, Microsoft and NetApp customers can expect datacenter solutions that help them reduce costs, increase performance, and reach new levels of efficiency."

The companies said that as part of the alliance, they will work together to expand product collaboration and technical integration activities in areas such as virtualized infrastructure solutions based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center, and NetApp storage systems; Sotrage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and Microsoft SQL Server; and cloud computing and hosted services that provide integrated data protection.

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