Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Server virtualization has caught the attention of many IT professionals for the cost savings and agility afforded via consolidation, business continuity and test/dev. However, Microsoft customers and Microsoft IT have moved beyond the traditional datacenter uses of virtualization and have begun innovating around the desktop and alternate software delivery models. Virtualization will help the industry accelerate the move towards a services-oriented model by enabling a broad set of offerings - from the OS to applications - to be portable and, therefore, available on demand. Greschler will provide examples and best practices of how organizations are leveraging virtualization beyond the datacenter.

Server virtualization is great for the data center in so many ways that it's easy to see why it's so popular. It reduces hardware costs, makes server provisioning far more flexible and ensures IT can be more responsive to business needs. At the Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West, technology experts Gordon Jackson, David Christian, Ken Jisser, and Ben Rudolph discussed the many different layers of virtualization and looked at how virtualization can help your business to succeed.

In light of today's explosive IT infrastructure growth and complexity, organizations are increasingly adopting virtualization as a means of consolidating IT resources, simplifying management, and minimizing overhead. One of the most complex issues facing VMware users trying to fully capitalize on virtualization is managing, allocating, and protecting virtual data as they would actual data. Chris will discuss a three-pronged approach to tackling issues around virtual data in VMWare. He will provide insight on how to create a single, integrated, comprehensive and centralized interface for administering VMware data through a virtual storage infrastructure that complements VMware virtualization technology.

In corporate environments, being able to integrate with existing systems is of extreme importance. Due to its nature, the open source development methodology forces software developers to be prepared to interoperate and integrate with whatever is already there. This is a big difference from the more traditional black box software mentality, and a huge benefit for enterprise customers. In this session, Hippo CTO Arjé Cahn will introduce Hippo CMS, an Open Source Enterprise Content Management system, and dive into the details of fitting a CMS into your environment.

With mounting pressure to decrease data center costs while staying on top of IT infrastructure, enterprises are pitted with the challenge to optimize their data centers. To meet this challenge, many are embracing virtualization. While this provides answers to IT managers challenges, mapping out a methodical approach with complete analysis and evaluation of all opportunities is critical. Participants will learn: 1. Key considerations in planning for a more virtualized data center; 2. What are unexpected costs and complexities moving to virtualized environments? 3. How does virtualization impact compliance? 4. What should you be thinking about prior to making the plunge?

Today's Web service providers must understand Quality of Service, filtering techniques and implement QOS and access list filters on their networks. A proper QOS and filtering design helps to avoid network bottlenecks caused by worm and virus infections, sudden spikes in traffic, broadband users, file sharing, and other network conditions. Service providers can use QOS and filtering techniques to align network usage with business policies and requirements, all while still serving customers and supporting their own back office needs. This presentation covers the key concepts of quality of service and access-list filtering using open source tools. The presentation includes an explanation of filtering using Linux's iptables tool and standard queuing methods as defined in the Differentiated Services RFC as well as applications of these methods through generic case studies.

Watching virtualization industry's evolution since 2003 with its blog virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli will report on today's market status, highlighting tough challenges in technology adoption, and on tomorrow's trends, providing insight on directions vendors are taking for the near-term future. This session will include a Q&A about the industry, its players, and is highly recommended for both virtualization newcomers and experienced adopters.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers. They're highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure. The net result is a high cost of ownership for a resource that is poorly positioned to meet the needs of businesses. Enter in server virtualization - the benefits of which are well documented, but there has been poor adoption to date due to cost and complexity. This session will explore the latest industry standards and open source technologies that are helping to open up the benefits of virtualization to a new segment of the market - enabling users to expand their virtualization initiatives.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

The confluence of several mature architectural paradigms with new user-centric paradigms will drive the next generation of IT. In his keynote presentation, Jeff Nick discusses the impact of service orientation on IT infrastructure; the relevant architectures, technologies, and standards; and the approaches for utilizing these tools and their importance to the business.