Virtualization Conference & Expo News Desk

Top Cloud Computing Providers in 2008: The Cloud Crowd

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Anyone allowing their search engine of choice to filter through the googols of bytes of data on the Web relating to "cloud computing" has during 2008 been rewarded with an exponentially increasing number of hits. But who are the companies currently most involved and what are their current offerings? SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal zeroes in on the facts and the faces behind this white-hot Enterprise IT technology trend.

Symantec Named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:45:00 EDT

The streaming technology of AppStream, now part of Symantec, reduces administrative overhead, costs, maintenance, and security concerns associated with managing applications and software on multiple endpoints. Its pull-based, on-demand software distribution platform combines the benefits of server-based computing (self-service access and centralized management and control) and distributed PC computing (disconnected application use and distributed processing), providing a "best of both worlds" solution. Software deployment and management via streaming is perfect for remote delivery because it only provides the application functions that an end-user needs, when those functions are needed, rather than delivering the entire application unnecessarily in advance. Applications become highly portable between machines and do not conflict with each other or with pre-existing, conventionally-installed software.

LynuxWorks Named "Bronze Sponsor" of SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:45:00 EDT

LynuxWorks, a leader in embedded software, provides open and reliable real–time operating systems and tools including the open-source BlueCat Linux and the LynxOS RTOS family, meeting the needs for the highest level of embedded software security. Our LynxSecure separation kernel uses the space and time partitioning features of LynxOS-178 safety–critical RTOS to provide the foundation for building highly secure systems utilizing the MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security) architecture and is designed for certification to Common Criteria EAL–7 as well as DO–178B level A.

Certeon Named "Silver Sponsor" of SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:45:00 EDT

Certeon’s aCelera Virtual Appliance software is a virtual appliance that delivers acceleration, virtualization and manageability when remotely accessing applications throughout a distributed enterprise. aCelera Virtual Appliances reduce application response time over the WAN by more than 95% without proprietary hardware appliances. aCelera is flexible and easy to deploy delivering faster, more scalable applications, and enabling greater user productivity.

From Amazon EC2 to Virtualization and Walled Gardens: An A to Z of Cloud Computing

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:00:00 EDT

From Amazon EC2 and App Engine from Google to Utility Computing, Virtualization, and Walled Gardens - there's no aspect of Cloud Computing that hasn't already been addressed at some level of detail in SYS-CON Media's Cloud Computing Journal (http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com). Here's a round-up of the world of Delivering Scalable IT as a Service, seen through the lens of the many contributors whose thoughts and ideas have already appeared there since it first appeared in June 2008 as the world's first journal devoted exclusively to the delivery of massively scalable IT resources as a service using Internet technologies.

Cloud Computing Expo - The Storm Cloud of Innovation

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:10:00 EDT

The Storm Cloud of Innovation is where user demands and vendor dynamics are played out, where the interactions between suppliers and architects are precipitated around the need to overcome challenges and roadblocks on the journey to adoption. In this session, 451 Research Director for Infrastructure Management, Rachel Chalmers examines a range of technologies and companies in this cloud, including virtualization management, orchestration, provisioning and datacenter automation.

Virtualization Conference & Expo - Jump Start Your Virtualization Projects with Microsoft Virtualization Solution Accelerators

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Are you ready to start planning for your upcoming virtualization projects? Do you wish to determine if your servers and desktops are ready for virtualization? Attend this session and see demos of Microsoft Virtualization Solution Accelerators, a suite of automation tools such as Microsoft Assessment and Planning, Offline VM Servicing Tool and more. See how they can help you speed up your virtualization projects today!

Blog-City.com Founder Alan Williamson to Present at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

As a solution provider it is vitally important you don't get locked into a specific vendor’s solution. This couldn't be truer in the world of on-demand or cloud computing. The way Amazon works is vastly different from Google, and different from Flexiscale. So how do you utilize the strengths of them all without compromising your own requirements? This session will take a look at a real world application, which spans across a number of different cloud hosts, providing redundancy, self-healing and self-scaling solutions without the fear of dancing to one vendors tune.

Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:30:00 EDT

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a round-up of some recent attempts to bring welcome precision where there risks being unnecessary vagueness.

rPath Founder & CEO to Present at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:20:00 EDT

Today, offerings such as Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are providing a new model for on demand compute resources based on virtual machines. Virtual appliances are a natural deployment vehicle for this type of infrastructure, allowing a clean separation between the memory, compute, and storage resources managed by the appliance provider and the complete software stack managed by the end user. Virtual appliances also allow a simple transition from internal virtualization clusters to outsourced providers, enabling capacity spikes to be handled. This session will showcase the tremendous flexibility, scalability, and financial savings that result from leveraging virtual appliances and cloud computing. Billy Marshall, CEO and founder of rPath will present a real life case study on KnowledgeTree, a document management provider, to examine the implementation of this strategy.

Hyperic Co-Founder & CEO to Present at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:05:00 EDT

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise "Ops-Free" computing. Because it’s easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming “technology’s next big thing.” However, with recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud’s competence, security and reliability have come into play.

Cloudworks CEO Mike Eaton to Present at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:40:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is the new buzzword in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don’t agree on exactly what the term means. We shouldn’t be surprised that mainstream business is approaching it with caution. Businesses have many concerns about moving their data to the cloud, some legitimate and some irrational. All these concerns need to be overcome in order for a widespread adoption of Cloud computing to occur. This session will discuss the obstacles to getting customers to embrace the concept of cloud computing and how to over come them. This session will cover topics such as the dangers of preaching to the converted, why “better” isn’t good enough when moving customers away from the familiar, and communicating the benefits without getting lost in the technical details.

SYS-CON.TV: View "Virtualization Power Panel" Live from Times Square, NYC

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:20:00 EDT

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Cloud Computing Expo - The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:30:00 EDT

As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is being more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today. In this session Reuven Cohen will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, he will explain, all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment.

Cloud Computing Expo - Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing: What's the Difference and When Do You Use Them?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:15:00 EDT

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. The “cloud” model initially has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. This is an important first step, but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, complete application infrastructure needs to be easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled and managed in these virtualized hardware environments.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Future Proofing Virtualization Management for Heterogeneous Environments

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Analysts estimate 80 percent of today’s virtualized environments run on VMware technology. However, that landscape will shift over the next 12 to 18 months as more powerful processors, competing hypervisors, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud computing take hold. Virtualization management will need to address heterogeneous environments that combine any number of different software and infrastructure platforms.

Cloud Computing Expo - Deploying Into the Clouds: Concepts, Benefits and Experiences

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:30:00 EDT

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. This session will distill the unique characteristics of clouds and describe how to best think about deployments in the clouds. Case studies and real experiences from Thorsten von Eicken’s two years of cloud computing experience will illustrate the pros and cons of today's cloud offerings.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Control VM Sprawl Before It Controls You; Best Practices

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:30:00 EDT

While organizations and IT staff continue to see the many benefits of implementing virtualization, the challenge of controlling virtual infrastructures is quickly arising as a top management priority. Virtualization benefits are offset by issues such as security, administration, increased costs, compliance and configuration management. Managing Virtual Machine (VM) sprawl is of growing concern to organizations as they grow their VM environments. Traditional management tool and security systems do not work well in this space, and virtualization vendor tools are more focused on deployment than management. Emerging technologies for implementing and enforcing policies, detecting and tracking VMs and managing the entire deployment process, are helping organizations gain better control over their virtual infrastructures without having to resort to manual systems, which often are expensive and error prone. Using real life examples, this presentation will discuss the sources of VM sprawl, the dangers inherent in it and present best practices to address these issues.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Preparing Your Enterprise for Virtualization

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:45:00 EDT

Virtualization carries the promises of flexibility, lower costs, ease of deployment and simplified server management. However, when condensing the physical resources of your enterprise, are you considering how to make applications easily accessible to the growing number of remote users within your enterprise? IT managers rushing toward virtualization within the data center are finding that virtualization and consolidation do not address remote access performance issues experienced by remote branch users in today's distributed enterprises. This presentation will explore the advantages and potential pitfalls of virtualization and how its impact will shape the future of the virtual enterprise.

Virtualization Conference & Expo - Virtualization: Beyond Hypervisors to Complete IT Infrastructure Management

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:45:00 EDT

This session describes how the wave of virtualization technology in the data center can be extended beyond hypervisors to embrace complete IT infrastructure management resulting in significant business value. It will commence by summarizing the fundamental problems that are holding back scale, flexibility and asset utilization in the data center. It will then describe an innovative approach to data center optimization that addresses the fundamental problems through virtualization of the complete IT infrastructure. This approach delivers “Services Oriented IT Infrastructure” (SOI) that can be fully exploited by evolving management systems to enable service providers and enterprises to more efficiently deliver service differentiation, business continuity, disaster recovery and opex reduction. The session will be complemented by examples of how Liquid Computing is delivering on this vision today along with other technology leaders in the industry.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: How to Adapt Physical, Virtual & Hybrid Infrastructures on the Fly

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:45:00 EDT

As more enterprises embrace virtual infrastructure for part or all of their compute infrastructure, tools are needed to effectively control both physical and virtual. Few large organizations seek to virtualize all of their servers due to the performance hit of virtualization layers. Dynamic provisioning delivers the best of both worlds – high performance plus flexibility. This session will address the issues of server consolidation, virtual & hybrid software infrastructure, and management complexity; it will also review solutions that enable building, deploying and managing software environments with simplicity and flexibility, whether their environment if physical, virtual or both.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Enterprise Virtual Management for Next-Generation IT

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:45:00 EDT

Virtualization enables strategic benefits, but significantly impacts infrastructure, operations and configuration management. Virtualization’s additional complexity and new management challenges can adversely affect TCO, reduce service levels, threaten security and pose compliance issues, as well as introduce new problems like VM sprawl. In this session, you'll learn how virtualization impacts traditional management disciplines, and their supporting people, processes, and technology. Participants will learn about the next generation of Enterprise Virtualization Management, and how it dramatically simplifies the management of growing virtual environments. Topics include eliminating sprawl, reining in snapshots, effectively dealing with offline VMs, and virtual appliances. You will also learn how to support distributed provisioning, delegated administration and self-service operations for enterprise virtual environments.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: How to Find and Resolve Capacity Bottlenecks in Virtual Server Environments

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Currently, an overwhelming majority of organizations are migrating and consolidating servers from physical to virtual environments. While the savings of the virtualized data center are extremely compelling, there is a new set of challenges that IT staffs didn’t have to deal with in the physical world. One of the challenges is getting used to the fact that all hardware resources: CPU, memory, storage, and network utilization are shared between virtual machines. This means that applications and users can impact each other and therefore resource monitoring becomes extremely important. If you don’t closely monitor resource consumption by each virtual machine and simply keep adding more virtual machines without doing analysis on how this will impact all four core resources, the result will be bad performance and even system downtime. Ultimately, this means unhappy users, dissatisfied managers, and a negative impact on the virtualization project. So, you need to find a way to prevent this problem.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Using Virtualization to Secure Your Users' Desktops

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:15:00 EDT

Currently most desktop productivity software including browsers, mail clients, Office suites, IM, and media players make direct connections to the Internet and/or run untrusted content. As a result, these applications, which are core to office productivity, are also the primary vector of infections from Internet-borne malicious software. This session will describe how desktop virtualization can be deployed within an organization to secure users' desktop applications against Internet-based threats and untrusted content.

Virtualization Conference & Expo: Startup Opportunities in the Virtualization Services Market

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

While the hypervisor market is dominated by VMware and other large companies, Opus Capital believes that startup opportunities abound. For example, several companies have enjoyed some early successes in desktop virtualization. Since no dominant player has emerged, this market still shows plenty of promise due to the undisputable benefits of the approach. Security is another area of opportunity: as the numbers of virtual machines grow, so too do the concerns of security stakeholders. We believe that the rapid adoption of EC2 and other cloud computing environments presents prospects for innovation as well.

"Cloud Computing Expo" Call for Papers Now Open

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:15:00 EDT

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling 'Cloud Computing' - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts. Merrill Lynch analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

Cloud Computing Expo - Cloud Adoption: Deploying Your Existing Applications to the Cloud

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:45:00 EDT

Virtualization has fostered a new generation of cloud services, enabling organizations to run a wide range of applications in the cloud. However, the value of cloud services will only be fully realized when organizations can take their existing application workloads, easily deploy them on standards-based cloud infrastructure and benefit from the increased scalability and lower costs of a utility model. Some workloads, such as application testing and training, are prime candidates for early deployment to a cloud provider due to their transient nature and high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This session will outline the key requirements to look for in a cloud provider that can support existing application workloads, important considerations for integrating a cloud service into your existing IT infrastructure and real-world ROI case studies from customers who have already transitioned some of their IT portfolio to cloud providers.

Cloud Computing Expo - Cloud Storage: A Paradigm Shift In IT

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:30:00 EDT

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current "in house" storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Factoring in pressures of power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand. Bottom line, companies must take a new approach to storage. Companies need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of "do everything yourself" to a new storage 2.0 cloud model. This session will show how Cloud storage delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the web applications and enterprise users.

Cloud Computing Expo: Getting Ready for the Cloud

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:30:00 EDT

With the transition to online services, unexpected peak loads can lead to system failure, loss of data, performance issues and more. Cloud computing aims to address these challenges by providing on-demand compute resources. However, the current infrastructure of existing applications was not built for such flexible environments. This session will demonstrate how to transition your applications to run on the Cloud without needing to completely re-architect them. Included is a 10-minute demo on turning an existing tier-based application into a tierless scaled out application running on the EC2 Cloud.

Cloud Computing Expo - Trusting the Cloud: Timing and Adoption of Cloud Technologies

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Cloud technologies offer many benefits over traditional IT systems, especially when managing the size and vastness of unstructured data and unpredictable growth in IT environments. But when does it make sense to adopt cloud technologies and migrate a set of your IT services to the cloud? The movement of information and services out of the data center and into the cloud can unleash fear in many of us. Trusting that your information is secure, accessible and protected is important, and deciding what information remains inside and outside of the cloud can be critical to the success of your business. In this session, Mike Feinberg, Senior VP of EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division will discuss how to optimize the deployment of cloud technologies and the options that exist for migrating information to the cloud.

Virtualization: Beyond Hypervisors to Complete IT Infrastructure Managment

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

How to Adapt Physical, Virtual & Hybrid Infrastructure on the Fly

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 EDT

Preparing Your Enterprise for Virtualization

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Virtualization carries the promises of flexibility, lower costs, ease of deployment and simplified server management. However, when condensing the physical resources of your enterprise, are you considering how to make applications easily accessible to the growing number of remote users within your enterprise? IT managers rushing toward virtualization within the data center are finding that virtualization and consolidation do not address remote access performance issues experienced by remote branch users in today's distributed d d enterprises. This presentation will explore the advantages and potential pitfalls of virtualization and how its impact will shape the future of the virtual enterprise.

Marketing the Cloud Computing Paradigm Shift

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don't agree on exactly what the term means. Mike Eaton, Founder and CEO of Cloudworks and Atticus Information Systems, will be giving a breakout session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise 'Ops-Free' computing. Because it's easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming 'technology's next big thing.' However, with recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud's competence, security and reliability have come into play. In this session, Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero will address these issues along with the many others surrounding the cloud including: The emergence of web operations as a discipline, How cloud computing simply changes, instead of eliminating the importance of web operations, What tools are available to help better manage cloud environments?

Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:45:00 EDT

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.

SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo: Themes & Topics

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:30:00 EDT

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.

SOA and Virtualization: The Ultimate IT Power Couple

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:45:00 EDT

SOA and Virtualization are viewed today as the ultimate IT power couple. They've been called two of today's hottest technologies: virtualization provides cost savings and flexibility, while a service-oriented architecture (SOA) affords application reuse and fast response to business needs.

EMC CTO Jeff Nick Keynotes SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo

Thu, 29 May 2008 11:00:00 EDT

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.

Microsoft's Greschler Keynotes SYS-CON's "Virtualization Conference & Expo"

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:15:00 EST

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.