Google’s got a securer cloud

Cloud computing is about making your information easily accessible from anywhere, on any device. Until today, organisations looking to secure their information beyond a password have faced costs and complexities that prevented many of them from using stronger security technologies. Today Google are changing that with the introduction of a more secure sign-in capability for Google Apps accounts that significantly increases the security of the cloud: Two-step verification. For the first time, Google are making it possible for organisations large and small to use this technology in just a few clicks for free.

Two-step verification is easy to set up, manage and use. When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, something you know: a password, and something you have: a mobile phone. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS, voice calls, or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. This makes it much more likely that you’re the only one accessing your data: even if someone has stolen your password, they'll need more than that to access your account. You can also indicate when you're using a computer you trust and don't want to be asked for a verification code from that machine in the future.

Two-step verification is built on an open standard designed to allow integration with other vendors’ authentication technologies in the future. Google are also open sourcing their mobile authentication app so that companies can customise it as they see fit.

Two-step verification continues Google’s stream of security innovation. In early 2009, they added the ability to view password strength and set minimum password length requirements for Google Apps accounts. Later in the year they were the first to provide HTTPS encryption to millions of users, and in 2010 Google Apps was the first cloud messaging and collaboration service to gain US government security certification.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can activate Two-step verification from the English version of the Admin Control Panel now, and Standard Edition customers will be able to access it in the months ahead. Once enabled by their administrator, end users can set it up in the Accounts tab in Gmail settings.

Microsoft Lync – Some New Features

This release of Lync is not just a minor upgrade from OCS 2007 R2. It has some great new features and functionality coming, here are some the key ones:

Lync 2010 Client

• Contact Cards – these are available in all Office and SharePoint applications as well
• Unified Contact Store – no longer do you have contacts all over place
• Activity Feeds – similar to Facebook status feeds shows list of status changes, title changes, OOF, etc.
• Fast Search – quickly find people in your organistion
• Skill Search – you can find experts on your campus for example
• Frequent Contacts – folks you communicate with the most are listed
• Conversation View – lists all the communications you have had in a single view (meetings, voice calls, IMs, etc)

 

New Mac 2011 client

Mac Office 2011 just Released To Manufacturing (RTM) last Friday.  With that release comes a new Outlook 2011 Mac client and a new Communicator client for Mac.

 

New Outlook 2011 for Mac client

Showing the ability to read Exchange calendar, change presence and display calendar information in the contact card on the Mac.

Some of the Mac 2011 enhancements include:

• Contact cards and photos
• Voice capabilities – make and receive calls internal and external – works with OCS 2007 R2 enterprise voice as well
• Outlook/Exchange calendar integration – view availability of contacts
• Presence throughout the Mac Office 2011 products – including co-authoring on documents with presence awareness

Dialpad View

Voice call view on Mac 2011 client

 

Conferencing

• Single client – Live Meeting client is GONE!! All conferencing is provided natively in the Lync 2010 client.
• Join reliability – make it easier to join meetings from mobile phones and from meeting reminders
• PSTN conferencing features – will have DTMF controls, audio announcements, meeting lobby
• Rich conferencing experience – record meetings directly into WMV format, work on content in background during presentations
• Panoramic HD video – support for HD conferencing now, panoramic HD support as well
• Desktop & Application sharing – lightweight desktop sharing for faster rendering times – no more 2 second delays, etc.
• Reach client called Lync 2010 Attendee client – this is a Silverlight client for PCs (people joining from off campus), Macs and other platforms to consume meetings
• Infrastructure consolidation
• Video interop with Polycom, Radvision and Tandberg

 

Mac conferencing

There are plans to have Mac conferencing capabilities using a Silverlight Lync 2010 Attendee client client (web) for Mac users to start. Mac users can consume Lync meetings now. Additional conferencing functionality for Mac may be in the works post RTM. I will post more as more info comes available.

Some Mac Silverlight client conferencing features include:

• View PC PowerPoints
• View shared PC desktop
• Remotely control PC desktop
• Annotate PowerPoints, virtual laser pointer
• Create and Post Polls, Vote in Polls
• Create Whiteboard, collaborate in whiteboard

Can be combined with Mac 2011 Communicator client to include:

• Audio conferencing
• Video conferencing

Voice client improvements

•Dialpad

• Voicemail access – visual voicemail is very nice since you can play voicemails right in the client
• Private line – can setup one private line per voice enabled person
• Call delegation – can setup boss/admin and use Attendant Console for Admins/Receptionists
• Call routing – setup calls to go to another line forwarding or simulring (cell, home phone, etc)
• Call quality notification – lets you know if you are on a bad connection, echoing, speaking too loudly/softly, etc.

• Call park
• Device transfer – you can switch between multiple device real time during the call – headset, ip phone, usb phone, etc.

Voice server improvements

Survivable branch appliance – appliance used for remote locations in case of a datacenter link outage/loss the SBA will leverage a PSTN connection for backup dialtone and failback to WAN link when available again. SBAs available from NET, Ferrari, HP, Audiocodes and Dialogic.

SBA diagram showing PSTN and WAN options

HP’s SBA appliance GUI screen

•Datacenter resiliency – can failover dialtone to alternate datacenters if primary datacenter goes down

• Call admission control (CAC) – can define bandwidth policies, audio and video routes, route traffic to Internet or PSTN based on links, etc.
• Announcement service – announce folks joining/leaving meetings
• Media bypass – no longer need mediation servers in remote locations for media nor are they needed for IP-PBX interop (for R2 voice customers today this translates to a huge reduction in Lync servers needed)
• E-911 for North America – native E911 location awareness  See my post here for more info.
• Response group improvements
• Analog device support – fax machines and analog phones can be reflected in call detail records, etc.

 

Deployment improvements

• Standard and Enterprise Editions
• Reduced # of server roles – elimination for need of dedicated mediation server and other roles
• Srver colocation enhancements
• Central Management Store – Lync config data stored in SQL now
• Planning Tool
• Topology Builder
• Migration tools

 

Mobility

Features potentially slated (subject to change of course):

Single number reach - both ways (from Lync to mobile and from Mobile to Lync) where your mobile number stays hidden

• Mobile voicemail avoidance – simul ring will send call to Exchange voicemail vs. mobile voicemail for example
• Photos for each of your contacts
• Join meeting – can join Lync conferences right from phone
• See attendees in a Lync conference – along with who is talking
• Control a Lync conference from mobile – mute, promote, remove, etc

Manageability

• Lync Server Control Panel – core Lync administration capabilities from web page
• PowerShell – Lync Server can be fully managed from the command line if GUI is not your cup of tea
• Role Based Access Control – granular administration delegation down the property level if needed
• Server Draining – can drain calls before shutting down server for maintenance for example
• Virtualistion Support – huge win here since now all the audio/video roles can be virtualised
• Enhanced monitoring – much better reporting and monitoring details, SCOM packs, etc.

New research from IP EXPO 2010 reveals that virtualisation and data security are the IT industry's top priorities for 2010/2011

Source: VMBlog

A survey of 257 of the UK’s top IT managers has shown that virtualisation and data security are top areas of focus for end 2010 and throughout 2011. The survey was carried out by IP EXPO 2010, Europe’s largest end-to-end IT infrastructure event.  Of the professionals surveyed, 88% rated data security as a key objective and spending priority for the coming year. This was closely followed by virtualisation which was identified as a priority among 85.8% of respondents. 

The survey demonstrates the strength of the IT managers’ desire to adopt virtualisation but also their reservations about the security of the technology and its ability to protect the sensitive data their companies hold. 57% of professionals surveyed believe that the roll-out of virtualisation & cloud based technologies will need to wait until security guarantees can be demonstrated. 

However this should not be seen as bad news for providers of virtualisation solutions. Only 3% of respondents believe that security issues will entirely stop their business from adopting virtualisation. 80% of respondents believe that virtualisation will require a revision of enterprise security tools and procedures but 81% believe that as a result virtualisation could in fact offer the opportunity to improve their business’s overall data security.

Adam Malik, Content Director for Imago Techmedia commented “The data security issues surrounding virtualisation are something the entire IT industry is coming together to address.  The priority is to make sure that this ground breaking technology can meet the needs of companies of all sizes as well as some of the UK’s highest risk legal and financial companies.”

About the Research

The survey was completed by 257 of IP EXPO’s top attendees. These include key players and decision makers in management, IT strategy, implementation and infrastructures.

dataplex are exhibiting and presenting at IPexpo across the two days, click here to register for free:

Google Storage

As Cloud Computing model is gaining steam worldwide, organisations are racing to launch Cloud based products and services in order to be the pioneers and capture a large market share of the "next big thing." One important and common usage of Cloud Computing platform is storage of data on the Cloud infrastructure. Storing data is one of the most basic requirements of any organisation or individual, and as the world keeps on churning out new information, the need for data storage keeps on increasing. In that sense, Cloud storage services can become a stable revenue producing product offering. After a slew of launches from the competitors such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Microsoft Azure Storage Services, Google recently came up with its own storage service which aims at providing organisations and individuals with a simple and easy way to upload, share, and manage data on Google's cloud infrastructure.

Google launched its Google Storage for Developers service in May 2010 during its I/O conference and aims at providing a number of products and tools in conjunction in order to make its Cloud offerings more attractive and competitive than other similar offerings in the marketplace. Google Storage for Developers allows users to easily upload, share, and manage data through a simple Web based interface or command line tools. Using Google Storage, users can store files of all sizes up to 100 Gb and of any type ranging from a simple text file to a complex database. A basic unit in Google Storage is a bucket (similar to a folder) which acts as a container of data and everything resides inside of a bucket. 

Google Storage follows a flat hierarchical structure just like a flat file structure which means that all buckets reside inside a single flat hierarchy and you cannot nest buckets inside of each other. Data which has to be stored inside Google Storage is called as objects and is placed inside of a bucket. An object is comprised of two parts: an object data which is the actual data which you want to store, and its corresponding object metadata. Users' data is opaque to Google Storage and objects are immutable in the sense that you cannot incrementally add data to objects. If users want to add more data to an existing object, then users have to overwrite the existing object with the new object. Uploads in Google Storage are atomic in nature, which means that objects are either entirely updated or not updated at all. One cannot read fractions of an object. Because of the flat hierarchical system, there is only one namespace which means that every bucket must have a unique name in the entire Google Storage namespace. Objects, however, need to have unique names inside of a bucket only and can have identical names across different buckets.

Through launch of Google Storage, Google has attempted to make strong inroads in the Cloud storage space and aims at providing easy and efficient ways of uploading, managing and sharing data on Cloud Computing. Its security and authentication features also aim to address the all important issue of security in Cloud Computing space. The service can be used by a number of prospective users ranging from individuals to corporations who need to store huge chunks of data and can then access it cheaply and efficiently.

Foursquare goes to University

Foursquare announced the rollout its Foursquare for Universities program recently, designed to help students, alumni and staff share information about classes, building hours, campus activities and traditions, and other information.

Late nights at the library are now a little bit better thanks to the geosocial service, which will reward you in badges what you missed in sleep (depending on how much value you put on virtual badges, anyways). And if you start to see more compsci majors at the Homecoming football game this season, you can thankFoursquare’s school spirit badge for that, too.

The startup has partnered with 20 universities for the launch, along with student ambassadors located at several dozen others. If your university isn’t one of them, however, don’t despair; Foursquare makes it easy for users to claim and build a university page on the service with a short questionnaire. Students can even request custom badges for their school.

Social Networks help drive revenues

With so many brands trying their hands at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: Is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so; the company’s head of social media Rick Wion recently spoke of the fast food giant’s big wins from a spring pilot program using Foursquare.

At the Mobile Social Communications conference, Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.

Econsultanty reports that McDonald’s, with Wion driving campaign direction and strategy, opted to try and take advantage of Foursquare Day (4/16) to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.

“I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores’,” Wion explained to conference attendees.

A company of McDonald’s size spends millions on advertising every year, and yet a simple $1,000 Foursquare campaign netted the company measurable success. Of course, the metric here was checkins (not sales), and there were likely several other factors contributing to the campaign’s success, but it’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.

McDonald’s is not alone in its Foursquare success. Earlier this year, Domino’s UK attributed social media, and its Foursquare pilot program in particular, as a significant factor in helping the company increase profits by 29%.

McDonald’s head of social media Rick Wion tweeted that, “the 33% increase was in the number of checkins. We consider checkins the same as a person entering the restaurant.”

Symantec NetBackup 5000 Appliance

Last week Symantec launched the first NetBackup hardware appliance called the NetBackup 5000.  There are plenty of data sheets, presentations and webcasts but if you're a gadget geek you probably just want the quick run down on specs.

At a higher level, the NBU 5000 has:

• 16TB capacity extensible to 96 TB through a multi-node configuration
• A less than 20 minute setup time per node
• Tape integration via NetBackup + built in replication for tapeless DR
• Compatibility with both NetBackup 6.5 and 7.0 environments

 

Basically you can buy 1 of these 4U boxes that holds 24 1 TB hard drives and send de-dupe data to it as a NBU Storage Unit in your existing environment OR you can take NetBackup PureDisk Clients and send data directly to the 5000 without going through a media server.  If you run out of room or need more space you can buy another another up to a total of 6 which would give you 96TB (6 x 16TB in each of them).  And best of all the de-dupe works across ALL of the appliances even as you keep adding new ones.  It's something called global de-duplication.

 

 

And now for the rear:

New Features in Citrix XenClient Pre GA release

Citrix announced a couple of weeks ago, the first version of its client hypervisor XenClient will be available at the end of September.

In the Release Candidate 2 published at the end of August the company added a boatload of additional features:

• support for Microsoft Windows 7 64bit virtual machines
• USB support for Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows Mobile phones, fingerprint readers, webcams, smart card readers, 3G data modems, etc
• support for Bluetooth devices
• support for mouse pointer trails
• automatic slipstream of Intel Graphics drivers in Windows virtual machines
• support for Intel MT KVM Remote Control (a VNC server embedded in the vPro chipset in Core i5 and i7 CPUs)
• support for Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT)
• support for manual and automatic locking of the environment
• new alerting system

On top of that Citrix has also included in the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) three new laptops: the HP EliteBook 2540p, the Dell Latitude E4310 and the Latitude E4200.

The Synchronizer component has a couple of key new features too:

• (Experimental) Dynamic Image Mode
  Virtual machine composition through three different layers: Base OS, Applications, User Profile.
  The Base OS layer can be updated or rolled back without touching installed applications and the user environment.
• Support for VM image streaming over HTTPS.

Source: Virtualization.info

Google Going More Social

Google will most probably launch its social network, Google Me, later this year. However, the secretive project might be more of an added layer to Google’s existing products and services than an entirely new service.

“We’re trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference on Tuesday.

Rumours about Google building a Facebook competitor became slightly more convincing back in August, when Google acquired Ångströ, a service that brings intelligent search results on someone’s professional network, as well as social app company Slide.

Now, however, Google Me is shaping up to be more like Buzz, in the sense that it will integrate with Google’s existing popular services such as e-mail and Google’s most important product — search.

“If you think about it, it’s obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better,” Schmidt said.

Hearing these words coming out of Schmidt’s mouth must be a a huge confidence booster for Facebook. If social networking is so important for search, Facebook has already solved that part of the equation. If Google’s social networking efforts fail, Google may become desperate to partner up with Facebook.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google plans to make its services more social without making the same mistakes again.

Cloud Computing Ramblings

There’s been a vast amount of interest from end users and providers alike over the past 2 years around cloud computing, and the new delivery models and acronyms around this technical sphere is growing at a exponential rate,  although everyone seems to have their own opinion and differing definition of cloud computing. 

While still evolving and being defined, cloud computing is here to stay. It promises a transformation – a move from capital intensive, high-cost, complex IT delivery methods to a simplified, resilient, predictable and a cost-efficient delivery platform.  As an end user organisation of different sizes, you need to consider where and when cloud may offer benefit and a positive edge to your business.

Cloud computing is a new concept of delivering computing resources, not a new technology.  Services ranging from full business applications, security, data storage and processing through to Platforms as a Service (PaaS) are now available instantly in an on-demand commercial model. In this time of belt-tightening, this new economic model for computing is achieving rapid interest and adoption.

Cloud computing offers substantial benefits including efficiencies, innovation acceleration, cost savings and greater computing power.  No more year long upgrade cycles; as huge IT burden like system or software updates are now delivered automatically with cloud computing.  Cloud computing also brings green benefits such as reducing carbon footprint and promoting sustainability by utilising computing power more efficiently.

Cloud computing can refer to several different service types, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS is generally regarded as well suited to the delivery of standardised software applications and platforms, like email, office productivity, collaboration, CRM and accounting. The development of the SaaS business model has been rapid and it is now being used to provide high performance, resilient and secure applications across a range of company sizes and industries. 

Cloud or SaaS does not provide one-size-fits-all solutions, and not every application in the cloud will be right for your business. You should consider in what areas it makes sense to utilise the cloud.  Where can your organisation gain improvement in areas of business efficiency, resilience and cost reduction? Look to others in your sector and what they have done, and look for simplicity and obvious choices in your first cloud solution adoptions.

Ignoring the cloud or moving everything to it in a race are both foolish options. Taking educated steps to the cloud will ensure you gain the benefits that it can bring and that you don’t end up in a technological storm.

Microsoft Lync – the new OCS

It’s was a pretty big day for the Office Communications team at Microsoft yesterday. Microsoft are making the release candidate of our ‘wave 14’ communications products available for anyone to download. In addition, there has been much speculation on what the new name for the release would be; the new name is Microsoft Lync.

Here's a little more information:

First the new name. For those of you who have followed the Office Communications business over the past several releases, you’ll know that this is an important milestone in a journey that started more than five years ago with a vision to transform communications with software. This vision, set out by leaders like Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes and Gurdeep Singh Pall, included bringing together various and “siloed” real-time communications systems and creating new ways for people to connect with each other. Lync 2010 is the release that delivers on this vision by unifying enterprise voice, instant messaging and web, audio and video conference – all within the same user experience and back-end infrastructure, as well connecting people in new ways through things like integrated expect search and interactive contact cards throughout Office.

Microsoft wanted a new name that reflected the major product transformation. In that sense, Lync – a combination of “link” and “sync” – is about connecting people in new ways, anytime, anywhere. Beyond simplifying and shortening the current branding, customer research found that the name Lync appeals to end users and IT pros, even more than descriptive options like Communicator.

With the 2010 release, Microsoft will use Lync as the ‘family’ brand and within each of their communications products:

Now about the release candidate. With nearly 20,000 people inside Microsoft and more than 100 enterprise customers already using the Lync 2010 beta, the R&D team is on track to deliver the product to market before the end of the year.

HP VSA now supports Hyper-V

The HP StorageWorks P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for Hyper-V runs inside a virtual machine, and is based on SAN/iQ iSCSI software that HP acquired when it bought LeftHand Networks. HP rolled out its first P4000 VSA for VMware virtual machines in April 2009. Along with Hyper-V support, the VSA now includes built-in automation of snapshots for Microsoft applications to reduce backup time for application data.

HP also added 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) connectivity to its StorageWorks P2000 G3 MSA, which supports 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and 6 Gbps SAS.

Google Search is now Instant

Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea, people can get results as they type their queries.

As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy which is why Google are very pleased to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions; yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.

Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:

• Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
• Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that they predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
• Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:

The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up.

Windows 7 Search and SharePoint 2010

Looking to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and using Windows 7 for your desktop operating system you really should look into the federated search capabilities provided by these products.  Windows 7 provides the ability for someone to easily move between searching their desktop and SharePoint-based content, reducing the need to switch between windows (such as a Windows Explorer window and a web browser), which may disrupt their flow of work.

This is enabled by Microsoft’s use of the OpenSearch standard. Windows 7 (acting as an OpenSearch consumer) displays results returned by SharePoint 2010 (acting as an OpenSearch producer). It does this by:

• Receiving a typed search query from the desktop user.
• Reformatting this query into a URL using a predefined pattern, which results in the search query being passed to SharePoint.
• Fetching the page from this pattern-based URL via HTTP, which is serviced by SharePoint. The contents of this page are the SharePoint search results in OpenSearch XML format.
• Displaying these results within the Windows desktop environment.

Note: this will also work with other OpenSearch-compliant systems and is not limited to just SharePoint.

VMware vShield Endpoint

At VMworld VMware announced vShield Endpoint.

vShield Endpoint is the last piece of the new vShield jigsaw.  Other technologies that comprise vShield are:

• Zones 4.1
• App 1.0
• Edge 1.0.

The four components are centrally managed by vShield Manager 4.1.

vShield Endpoint is a framework that leverages the VMware VMsafe APIs and allows third party anti-virus vendors to scan and remediate infected virtual machines in a more effective manner.  This new architecture allows 3rd party providers to be deployed only on a single, dedicated VM, offloading the protected guest operating systems from endpoints within the image.

The only agent that virtual machines have at that point is the vShield Endpoint one.

The health status of this VMware agent is monitored inside vCenter Server.

The operating systems that are currently supported are:

• Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (both 32 and 64bit)
• Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32bit only)

The core component, called “Security Virtual Machine (SVM), is delivered throught VMware security partners.

Symantec Enterprise Vault 9

As you may have seen, Symantec have announced the release of Enterprise Vault 9.0 and the NetBackup 5000 appliance. On the Enterprise Vault side, customers have been very eagerly awaiting both the Exchange 2010 SP1 support and the new Discovery Collector offering.

The first question many customers have is, “What? An appliance? Is Symantec becoming a hardware company?” Let me hit that one straight on – NO. I strongly believe that the value in both data protection and archiving is in the software, and an appliance is one of many form factors to deliver that value.

So what is Symantec’s strategy for Information Management? In short, they are working hard to help customers delete more of their information. Most customers we talk to are seeing 30%+ year over year data growth with flat or shrinking budgets, so they need a comprehensive approach to tame that beast. We recommend four key ingredients for success: protect completely, de-duplicate everywhere, delete confidently, and discover efficiently.

Protect Completely

The need for an enterprise to protect its data has not changed from 10 years ago and I’d argue it won’t change 10 years from now. What will change is the shrinking backup window available to protect it, the need for ever faster recovery, and continued budget pressure. Only Symantec offers the breadth of technologies - OS/application support, archiving, virtual synthetics, CDP/R, dedupe, deep VMware / Hyper-V support – and the continued R&D investment to deliver here.

Deduplicate Everywhere

In talking to customers, many realise that the first and best area to de-dupe is actually in the application itself, using archiving (Enterprise Vault). By offloading data from the primary application, you can improve application performance, save money on storage, and back it up once instead of time and time again. After that, the next best place to de-duplicate is at the client level and Symantec support that with the embedded dedupe in NBU 7. For some performance-sensitive apps, you’ll instead want to de-dupe at the media server level. For other environments, such as remote offices, it is easiest to drop in a dedicated appliance like the NBU 5000.

The key to all of this, though, is that customers need to be able to adopt all these forms of de-dupe without buying four different tools and becoming System Integrators. Information management is supposed to “just work,” and not having four tools is the right place to start.

Delete Confidently

What if you could keep just 30 days of backups online and replicate for DR? You could get rid of tapes completely, save a ton of money, and restore much faster.

Meet with the retention setting group at your company to ask them why the retention policy says “data must be kept on tape for 10 years.” Ask them, “What if I could keep the data you need for 10 years and get you EXACTLY what you need, do it within 24 hrs instead of 1 week, and save money.” Once the retention managers understand what archiving can do for them, you can get the flexibility you need to run your environment differently.

Discover Efficiently

Most customers I meet with has dealt with legal discovery (some weekly), and realise the increasingly painful distraction it is to IT. You can find the data fast (good for IT), find ONLY the relevant data (good for risk), and hand over as little as possible to your own solictors for legal review (good for saving money).

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

Application Virtualisation

Application virtualisation and desktop virtualisation solutions break the link between the applications, operating systems and end-users. This approach can improve IT efficiency and provide a rich desktop experience for users.

Many organisations look to manage the desktop complexity through a unified approach in order to reduce IT operational costs and provide better solutions that will allow IT to deliver and manage applications with the flexibility and agility to support increasing user demand.

Many companies have started migrating toward Windows 7 while the Windows XP end-of-support date is expected in 2014. The Windows 7 upgrade is not an easy process, as many legacy applications are still incompatible with Windows 7. The upgrade process is long and complex, requires long test cycles, and might break application compliance.

This process can cause loss of user productivity and increase help desk support calls, adding significant costs to the upgrade process.

With the traditional approach, users get device-centric computing, where all components (applications, OS, data, user profiles) are bound to a specific device. This approach is difficult to maintain and support, as a problem at one layer can destroy the entire stack. Device and data recovery are also difficult and expensive, and flexibility and mobility are constricted as DR solutions require application customisations.

Defining a Strategy

Proper design should help define and prioritise the application packages that are required, finding the dependencies while taking into consideration prerequisites, best practices, future maintenance and support, security, and availability.

Proper application management and solid procedures are sometimes overlooked. One of the goals of desktop virtualisation is to simplify the management of the desktop environment. Remember, the desktop is the easy part. Spend your time looking at your application; sometimes it will be easier to virtualise applications before trying to upgrade the applications to reduce time and costs.

Perform a proof of concept and agree on the right solution, define the critical success factors that will meet the business requirements, and identify risks. Those assessments will define the required software and hardware at each site.

These projects usually gain high visibility in the organisation, but there is an impact on user productivity. The new approach might introduce its own risks and issues, which should be mitigated with the right methodology.

Backup for XenServer!

In the last four years PHD Virtual (formerly PHD Technologies) has been solely focused on the VMware market, competing with larger companies like Quest/Vizioncore and Veeam. But in early 2010 the start-up decided to extend its support to other virtual infrastructures. This led to an investment from Citrix in May, and to the release of Backup for Citrix XenServer 1.0 last week.

The new product offers the same look & feel of the VMware version but the feature-set is not completely aligned yet.
PHD Virtual clarified to virtualization.info that this doesn’t depend on any technical constrain or lack of R&D resources: simply, the company delivered the XenSource version as soon as possible and so had to prioritize the delivery of certain capabilities.
In the coming months, the two version will share exactly the same capabilities.

The company published a video of the new product in action:

 

Source: virtualization.info

VMware View on the iPAD.

At VMworld VMware reached for the now compulsory business tool – the iPad and demonstrated View 4.5.  I have to say that I’m rather impressed with

This is a big plus from VMware for many reasons, firstly this is a real View client with support for PCoIP.  More significantly though, VMware has worked hard to get the user interface right.  The client provides some good multi-touch gesture support with a full Windows keyboard.

VMware has overlaid a touchpad on top of a full screen Windows desktop to provide an iPad user experience.

Most importantly, the client is free.

Check it out for yourself:

Just what is a private cloud?

Cloud computing has two distinctly different meanings. The first is simple: The use of any commercial service delivered over the Internet in real time, from Amazon's EC2 to software as a service offered by the likes of Microsoft or Google.

The second meaning of cloud computing describes the architecture and technologies necessary to provide cloud services. The hot trend of the moment is the so-called private cloud, where companies in effect "try cloud computing at home" instead of turning to an Internet-based service. The idea is that you get all the scalability, metering, and time-to-market benefits of a public cloud service internally.

The concept of cloud is quite a debate interally at dataplex, and we have often mocked the private cloud as doing the same as we always have but with a new tag on the front.

Yet, despite natural scepticism, the private cloud appears to be taking shape. The technologies underlying it are pretty obvious; virtualisation and data centre automation.  Chargeback metering keeps business management happy and identity-based security helps ensure only authorised people get access to the infrastructure and application resources they need.

At VMworld, HP jumped into the private cloud feet first with its CloudStart solution, which combines hardware (HP BladeSystem Matrix), software (HP Cloud Service Automation), and professional services (HP Cloud Consulting) to yield private cloud deployments within 30 days. Rather than dev and test, HP is focusing on delivering business applications as private cloud "services," from Microsoft Exchange to Oracle PeopleSoft to SAP Business Objects.

Also at VMworld,key companies were talking about their partner cloud solutions, using private clouds managed by vCloud Director, VMware's new cloud management solution.

So on the one hand, the private cloud is just another step toward the commoditisation of IT, where internal customers pick from a menu of metered services across a virtualised infrastructure, rather than specifying the nth requirement for custom deployments that tie up resources forever. On the other hand, one of the most exciting use cases for the private cloud is the ability for enterprises to establish public clouds for partners, which may accelerate business-to-business e-commerce in unanticipated ways.

VMware vCloud Director

Better late than never!  Its been rather busy trying to keep up with the day job let alone the blog of late!  But anyway, for those of you who dont know.  At VMworld the other week VMware release vCloud Director.

VCloud Director lets you manage multiple instances of vCenter — internally, across multiple data centers and even in external service providers’ data centers. The goal is to create entirely virtual data centers, with the end game being private or hybrid clouds.

CEO Paul Maritz said a management tool that’s compatible across internal and external data centers is a necessity if cloud computing is to catch on, because multiple tools “end up costing you money” instead of bringing savings.

We’ve known about this product for more than a year, when it was first under development as Project Redwood. Word came in May that VMware would release it at VMworld with the name vCloud Service Director, and now we know its official name is just vCloud Director.

For enterprise IT, vCloud Director holds a lot of promise, but also many challenges. Many organisations are dealing with more pressing server virtualisation needs, and the prospect of buying yet another management tool to create a dynamic data center may be too much too soon.

Plus, there’s the not-insignificant point that vCloud Director won’t be able to create private or hybrid clouds all on its own. Much like vSphere, vCloud Director will rely on third-party tools to unlock its full potential, adding more layers of cost and complexity.

EMC with New VMware Integration

Source: CRN

Forget the HP-Dell dog-fight over storage virtualisation power 3Par. EMC is trumping both rivals with an unprecedented level of integration with its crown jewel VMware product.

EMC Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Jeremy Burton Monday touted the breakthrough new VMware integration, including new functionality aimed at managing the storage giant's Clariion and Celerra product lines with VMware's vCenter virtualisation management product.

The software enhancements, which are scheduled to be formally announced on Tuesday, include 60-plus integration points with VMware, the landmark namesake virtualisation company that EMC bought seven years ago for $635 million. The software enhancements are the most extensive product integration points since EMC acquired VMware.

The VMware integration goes deeper than either HP, Dell or other storage players have in VMware integration, said Burton.

The EMC VMware offering comes with HP stunning the storage world with a $1.6 billion offer to outbid rival Dell for 3Par, which has gained wide acclaim for its storage arrays built for public and private cloud computing. The HP offer comes one week after Dell said it would purchase 3Par for $1.15 billion.

Speaking at the CRN parent Everything Channel's XChange Conference, Burton told several hundred solution providers that the VMware VCenter management console integration is unprecedented. "If you are a VMware administrator you can look down into storage and if you are an EMC administrator you can look up to the virtual machine," he said. "You only get that with EMC."

The software enhancements provide an unprecedented level of efficiency and simplicity for solution providers managing storage in a virtualised environment, said Burton.

"This is a huge software release for us, geared around how to drive the best storage in a virtual environment," said Burton. "The single point of management (with VCenter) for mid-tier storage arrays is a first. We have never had as extensive a set of integrations with VMware."

The software enhancements feature a new interface that boasts up to "90 percent fewer clicks" required for common administrative tasks associated with storage management, said Burton.

"If you are running in a virtual environment, you want to make sure that there is a level of integration between the way you manage the storage and the way you manage the server," said Burton. "By working with VMware, we have about 60 different integration points with the VMware product portfolio."

EMC is also adding software enhancements to provide FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) to any Clariion or Celerra storage array purchased in the last several years. "If you are going to move to 10-Gbit Ethernet, you don't have to buy a new box," he said. "You can retrofit it to anything that has been bought in the last couple of years. That is a huge deal."

Those FCoE capabilities provide partners with an additional sales opportunity for existing Clariion and Celerra customers, he said.

Also included in the new software are new enhancements to EMC's FAST, or Fully Automated Storage Tiering, capability. FAST automates the movement of data within a storage system according to tiering policies to deliver higher service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs, according to EMC.

"We can now be very, very granular with how we move data around," Burton said.

Citrix & Cisco

Citrix's XenDesktop is being integrated with Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) to deliver a new Cisco Desktop Virtualisation Solution.

The Cisco Desktop Virtualisation Solution is intended to let enterprises deliver virtual Windows desktops to end users.

Both Cisco and Citrix will generate revenues from the sale of the combined solution," Jackie Ross, vice president of Cisco's server, access and virtualisation technology group, told InternetNews.com. "This combined solution will be sold through mutual channel partners," noted Ross, who also said the companies aren't releasing any financial terms connected to the joint effort.

Sumit Dhawan, vice president of the desktop division at Citrix, said the combination of XenDesktop and Cisco UCS provides scalability and cost savings. With traditional server platforms, Dhawan said memory can become a bottleneck as more virtual desktops are added. The Cisco UCS offers memory-extension technology that can deliver up to 60 percent greater virtual desktop density per server with no degradation in application performance when compared with other server platforms with standard memory configurations.

"This, in combination with the tight integration of networking computing and virtualisation provided by the Cisco UCS, leads to 20 percent lower cost of infrastructure per virtual desktop," Dhawan told InternetNews.com.

Prior to the announcement of the Cisco Desktop Virtualisation Solution, Citrix's XenDesktop was deployable and usable on Cisco UCS. That said, Ross said the new solution is aimed at making it easier for enterprise shops to adopt desktop virtualisation with pre-configured service profiles, a simplified starter kit and a pre-tested validated design to ensure smooth interoperability.

Cisco also has a deep strategic relationship with VMware for the UCS which also includes a joint venture with EMC.

"The Cisco Desktop Virtualisation with Citrix XenDesktop solution includes a validated reference design architecture which supports VMware vSphere as well as Citrix XenServer hypervisors," Ross said. "This solution is built upon an open architecture and we expect to expand support for additional hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V and additional storage solutions beyond NetApp in the future. Cisco is committed to working across our open ecosystem of partners to deliver business and technology solutions that solve their pain points while giving them more solutions to choose from that meet their specific needs."

Ross added that the desktop virtualisation space is on the brink of mainstream adoption and thinks Citrix is at the forefront of the technology. The plan for Cisco moving forward is to continue to develop solutions, though Ross didn't detail what those solutions might include.

Location:Stone Rural,United Kingdom

NEW - NetBackup 7.0.1 Release

The 7.0.1 release continues to build on the strong foundation started with NetBackup 7. Customer adoption of NetBackup 7 has been faster than any of Symantecs previous major releases.  New features in 7.0.1 are:

Client Offline: This feature allows you to easily designate specific clients as being offline or unavailable for backup for a fixed period of time. By doing so you can reduce the amount of time  spent troubleshooting failed backups that were known to be offline to begin with. Specific duration times can be set so the client  will automatically come back online and resume with the next incremental or full backup.  

Audit Trails:  If you need to track policy changes and restore jobs, you will love this feature. With Audit Trails you will better understand who changed what policies and when. This feature also details who executed which restore jobs and what they restored.  When troubleshooting backup jobs – it helps to answer the question “what has changed”?

NDMP improvements: Symantec have made two significant improvement in their support of NDMP. First they have introduced a stream handler which allows their De-duplication engine to intelligently look inside the NDMP stream to provide the maximum De-duplication rate possible.  Additionally they are introducing multiplexing support for remote NDMP backups. This feature allows you to multiplex multiple NDMP streams together to better take advantage of the high through put rates of today’s tape drives. This allows you to keep the tape media streaming, improving backup performance.

Hyper-V Volume GUID support: Those of you using Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation technology will no doubt welcome this enhancement. NetBackup now supports the use of volume GUIDs in these environments instead of simply drive letters.  Volume GUIDs have been Microsoft’s recommend way of configuring clustered Hyper-V volumes and now NetBackup can backup and restore using these GUIDs.

Enterprise Vault 9 agent: 7.0.1 provides agent support for those of you running Enterprise Vault 9. This agent greatly simplifies the process of backing up and restoring your Enterprise Vault environment.

Just what are intel building?

Source: Virtualization.info

Intel acquires Neocleus


Intel is definitively building something. The chipmaker is shopping, and shopping quickly, in the software market with a primary focus on security. At least for now.

Just a couple of weeks ago the company announced the acquisition of the security giant McAfee for $7.68B in cash. Now it acquires the virtualization startup Neocleus.

The news is not official yet, but Neocleus posted the news on its corporate blog a few hours ago, which Intel immediately required to remove.

Neocleus launched in May 2008, entering the virtualization market with an ambitious plan to leverage a client hypervisor for security purposes. Their product, based on Xen, has been one of the first on the market, along with the Virtual Computer NxTop.

The company, funded by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel for $16.4M in two rounds, has been under the radar for most of its time.

Neocleus go-to-market strategy changed over the last two years, as their product failed to get any serious traction: in early 2010 the company released a version of its TrustedEdge platform called NeoSphere that could be OEM’ed and extended by PC lifecycle management (PCLM), security and help desk vendors. The first company to adopt it, in March, has been BigFix.

There’s no confirmation about the price that Intel paid for Neocleus but several sources suggest that it’s probably quite small as the startup was nearly out of cash.

Whatever the price is, the move leads to at least two interesting considerations:

In January 2009 Intel and Citrix announced a pretty strong partnership on XenClient, the client hypervisor that will be released at the end of this month.
It’s not clear yet what Intel plans to do with McAfee and Neocleus, but it may imply a change in the relationship with Citrix.

In May Citrix announced a two-phases partnership with McAfee on XenClient, so even this alliance may be impacted.

Right now on the market there are only three vendors working on client hypervisors: Virtual Computer which already ships NxTop, Citrix which is about to ship XenClient, and MokaFive, which just previewed its new platform at VMworld and that would probably ship later this year.

Citrix has no direct control on Virtual Computer but it’s one of its investors, so it has a sort of option on any potential acquisition, and MokaFive has yet to deliver and build a credibility as client hypervisor vendor.

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

HP outbid Dell, and win the race for 3Par

Friday, September 03, 2010: The multi-billion dollar bidding war for 3PAR is officially over. After Dell pulled out of the race to acquire the data storage company this morning, 3PAR announced that it has terminated its merger agreement with Dell and also paid the company the $72 million termination fee. Meanwhile, 3PAR has entered into a fresh agreement with HP under which the latter will now purchase 3PAR, through a cash tender offer of $33 per share in cash, or an enterprise value of $2.35 billion. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

Combining 3PAR’s utility storage products with HP’s existing storage solutions will strengthen HP’s storage, server and networking portfolio. According to the company, 3PAR will accelerate HP’s highly successful converged infrastructure strategy by driving growth in the fast-growing virtual data centre and cloud computing markets.

“HP and 3PAR is a winning combination that will accelerate HP’s converged infrastructure strategy and bolster our ability to provide customers with the industry’s highest levels of performance, efficiency and reliability,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, enterprise servers, storage and networking, HP. “We intend to invest in 3PAR’s technology to create long-term value for our stakeholders.”

“As part of HP, 3PAR’s agile, efficient storage solutions will truly thrive, particularly given HP’s ability to accelerate investment in our products and reach new customers around the world,” said David Scott, president and chief executive officer, 3PAR. “3PAR has built a reputation for delivering enterprises and cloud computing service providers the ability to do more with less. HP’s global reach, strong routes to market and our shared culture of innovation will allow even more organisations to experience the transformative value of 3PAR’s technology.”

Location:London Rd S,,United Kingdom

VMware vShield Endpoint

VMware vShield is a suite of security virtual appliances built for VMware vCenter Server integration. The central component in this solution is the vShield Manager.

The vShield Manager is the centralised network management component of vShield, and is installed as a virtual appliance on any ESX host in your vCenter Server environment. A vShield Manager can run on a different ESX host from your vShield agents. Using the vShield Manager user interface or vSphere Client plug‐in, administrators install, configure, and maintain vShield components.

One of the VMware vShield components is VMware vShield Endpoint. vShield Endpoint delivers an introspection‐based antivirus solution. vShield Endpoint uses the hypervisor to scan guest virtual machines from the outside without a bulky agent. vShield Endpoint is efficient in avoiding resource bottlenecks while optimizing memory use. vShield Endpoint installs as a hypervisor module and security virtual appliance from a third‐party antivirus vendor (VMware partners) on an ESX host.

VMware is collaborating with leading security vendors such as McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro to integrate and deliver full endpoint protection solutions based on VMware vShield.

XenClient 1.0 RC2 Released, New Features in XenClient Post 1 of 2

Citrix have just posted the second release candidate of XenClient and the Synchronizer for XenClient to the web. Some of the key advancements are:

Windows 7 x64

This was one of the top requests as Citrix are seeing about a 50/50 split with customer deployments of Windows 7 between 32bit and 64bit. The Xen virtualisation technology Citrix use in XenClient is 64bit so adding this support was really a matter of porting the graphics, USB, and other supporting drivers over to 64bit. The storage and networking drivers were already 64bit ready courtesy of the XenServer group.

Improved USB

Another top request was improvements to USB device support. So Citrix spent a lot of time making major improvements to the USB support in XenClient. This includes support for integrated USB devices such as webcams and fingerprint readers. Also Citrix built a new user interface for routing USB devices between VMs and setting up persistent connections between VMs and USB devices. At this point most USB devices should work with the platform.

Citrix have added support for the following devices:

• Apple iPod, iPhone, iPad
• Microsoft Windows Phones
• Android Phones
• Headsets
• Fingerprint Readers
• Webcams
• Smart Card Readers
• 3G data modems.

Bluetooth

With the new improved USB support comes support for a variety of Bluetooth devices. On most systems in the HCL the Bluetooth system is actually a USB device that can be assigned to a virtual machine. This allows that virtual machine to talk to your Bluetooth devices.

Usability Enhancements

Citrix have spent a lot of time on incorporating usability feedback into this release and these are some of the ones that stand out.

Simplified VM upload and download process

Citrix removed combined steps and even removed a number of steps to make the process of uploading a VM image to a Synchronizer simple. Citrix also removed the duplicate publish VMs that were cluttering the UI.

Improved display of upload/download progress

Along with enhancements to the actual upload and download process Citrix enhanced the display of upload and download progress information and now include this information on the main Receiver for XenClient UI.

In VM alerting system

Citrix have a brand new in VM alerting system that will make sure users are aware of critical issues affecting the system such as low disk space, policy actions, or impending lease time expiries. Previously this type of information was only available in the Receiver for XenClient UI.

Automatic slipstream of Intel Graphics drivers

XenClient has some great 3D graphics support that lets a virtual machine have direct access to the Intel graphics system for a native graphics experience. Now in this release Citrix automatically slipstream the Intel graphics drivers into most versions of Windows. So you can flip on the 3D graphics feature and be ready to go without having to download any drivers.

Intel Extended Page Tables support

In this release Citrix added support for hardware acceleration of virtual memory operations for increased memory performance. In the past the Xen hypervisor Citrix use in XenClient did an admirable job of page table virtualisation but nothing beats hardware assist and this will give Citrix an extra boost in overall performance for memory operations.

Secure Application Sharing

Citrix made a large number of enhancements to the secure application sharing feature to make it easier to use and provide helpful guidance if a publishing VM is not active. Below are a list of some of the enhancements that have been made:

• Automatic resolution changes when attaching a projector or external monitor
• Notifications if the publishing VM is alseep or powered off
• Ability to adjust thickness and color of secure shared application windows
• Blacklisting of non-essential Windows utilities and built-in apps

Expanded hardware compatibility

This was also a big area of feedback from RC1 and over the next few releases you will see a big increase in the number of systems and peripherals Citrix support.

Added support for the following laptops:

• HP EliteBook 2540p
• Dell Latitude E4310
• Dell Latitude E4200

Added support for the following desktop:

• HP Compaq 8000 Elite

Added support for the following wireless adapters:

• Support for Dell Wireless™ 1501 adapters
• Support for Dell Wireless™ 1520 adapters
• Support for Intel 5150 Wireless adapters (WiFi Only)
• Support for Intel 6250 Wireless adapters (WiFi Only)
• Support for Broadcom 4312G Wireless adapters
• Support for Broadcom 4322AGN Wireless adapters.

VMware View 4.5 - Some Further Details

The NDA for VMware View 4.5 has been lifted and we talk a little bit about an important new storage feature released with View 4.5 – Tiered Storage. Tiered Storage allow administrators to select the most adequate Datastore for a given type of disk (.vmdk) and/or workload.

VMware View Composer works with base images as follows:

• Master Replica – The Master Replica is a one off for each SOE used as template. Unless the homework has not been properly done there shouldn’t be many Master Replicas.
• Replica – The replica is a thin provisioned clone of the Master Replica. It is created for each new desktop pool in each datastore and it’s based on the snapshot in use at any given desktop pool.
• Linked Clone – is composed of Delta Footprint + Log + User Data Disk.

VMware View 4.5 introduces the following new disks:

• Persistent Disk – This is the old User Data Disk that has been renamed. It is still possible to store the persistent disk within the Guest OS disk, or in a separate disk.
• Disposable Disk – A separate disk for the guest OS paging and temp files, View Manager deletes these disposable files when the linked clone is powered off.

The Linked Clone virtual desktops are now composed of Delta Footprint + Log + Persistent Disk + Disposable Disk, therefore the new storage calculation formula has also changed to:

Total Storage = (n° VMs * (Delta Footprint + Log + Persistent Disk + Disposable Disk) + Replica + Master Replica + Overhead)

Linked Clones with disposable disks can slow the growth of linked clones. Be aware that you will now be assigning a Disposable fixed size disk upfront and this should be included in the calculations. When you configure a linked-clone pool from a parent virtual machine, make sure you configure a disposable-file disk that is larger than the paging-file size.

As I mentioned, VMware View 4.5 allow administrators to select different Datastores, where different types of virtual disks (linked clone, persistent and disposable) can be stored on fast, high-I/O storage, e.g., enterprise solid state disk drives (ESSDD) or Fibre Channel, and less accessed data onto less-expensive drives such as SAS or SATA. High-I/O storage will provide better performance for View Composer replicas that are constantly accessed (read-only) by all virtual desktops in the pool.

Administrators are able to choose these options during the initial setup of the desktop pool. Datastores can be changed and/or re-assigned after the initial setup, but be aware that the selection to use Persistent Disks and Disposable disks can only be done during the initial setup of the desktop pool.

The ability to designate a Datastore dedicated to replica disks is IMHO one of the most important storage improvements in VMware View 4.5 and will allow for much greater I/O performance.

VMware View 4.5 yet presents some additional new features:

• Windows 7 Support 32/64-Bit
• Smart Card Support for PCoIP
• Local Mode Desktop
• A native Mac Client
• Kiosk Mode
• Automated USB Redirection
• Location based printing
• Client localisation (German, Japanese, French, Simple Chinese)
• Adobe Flex UI Administrator interface
• Higher broker scalability
• Role based delegation
• SysPrep support for Linked Clone desktop pools
• Persistent disk management
• Refresh, Recompose and storage rebalance for non-persistent pools
• Semi-automatic pools
• Extensibility with Powershell, SCOM and SDK’s, Event database
• System Dashboard, User diagnostics and troubleshooting
• ThinApp entitlement
• Smart Card revocation
• Support for vSphere and vCenter version 4.1

Citrix buys VMLogix

Citrix has announced that it will buy VMLogix as part of a larger push to offer more self-service tools and address concerns like vendor lock-in facing enterprises using the cloud.

VMLogix is a provider of virtualisation automation and management technologies. Citrix expects to include some of the technologies from VMLogix in its next free XenServer release, which will allow enterprise users to set up virtual services on internal computing resources in the same way they do on public clouds. Typically, public cloud providers let users order up compute services online and start using them immediately.

Citrix will also add technology from VMLogix to its Citrix OpenCloud platform so that its public-cloud-provider customers can offer lifecycle management capabilities like quality assurance and business continuity.

Citrix also plans to add new capabilities to OpenCloud that will let enterprise customers manage a mix of public and private cloud workloads from a single management console, even if they use services from different cloud providers.

Finally, Citrix said it will add virtual switching capabilities to OpenCloud using Open vSwitch, an open-source virtual switch that supports the OpenFlow protocol. The idea is to make it easier for cloud providers to build isolated multitenant clouds while offering dynamic policies.

Google Priority Inbox

Information overload is a reality of the modern workplace. The average corporate worker sends and receives more than 150 messages per day, an email deluge of varying importance: key project updates from colleagues, requests from higher-ups, appointment reminders, and automated mail that’s often much less important. With so much information to process, simply figuring out what needs to be be read and what needs a reply takes up a lot of time. Google have recently launhed Priority Inbox Beta in Gmail, an experimental new way of reducing information overload.

Priority Inbox is a new view of your inbox that automatically helps you focus on your most important messages. Gmail has always kept spam messages out of your inbox, and now Google have improved Gmail’s filter to help you see the emails that matter faster without requiring you to set up complex rules.

Here’s how it works: Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else”:

Messages are automatically categorszed as they arrive in your inbox. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better. You can improve the ranking in Priority Inbox by clicking the buttons at the top of the inbox to mark conversations as important or not important.

As a result, your inbox is better organised, and you can spend your time addressing your most important emails right away.

VMware Expands it's Cloud Capability

Cloud computing is an industry term for information that is stored remotely on equipment operated by outside specialists and accessed via the Internet.

At its annual conference this week, VMware has unveiled technology aimed at both making it easier for businesses to move information into the cloud and to run their own data centers more efficiently.

Named "vCloud Director", VMware’s new software is aimed at letting businesses set up server-computer systems to run new programs more quickly than the days or weeks it often takes now.

The product also helps companies track in more detail the computing resources these programs consume.

It also gives businesses the ability determine on the fly whether a program will run on their own computers or “in the cloud.”

Running a data center “will become increasingly a business discussion,” and not a series of technical decisions, said Paul Maritz, VMware’s chief executive.

Research company IDC predicts that spending on cloud computing will increase to $55.5 billion in 2014 from $16.5 billion in 2009 as businesses realise it can be cheaper to outsource their data centers than to build and manage their own.