Virtualization

Brocade this week extended its data center networking portfolio with hardware and software enhancements designed to better integrate and align physical and virtual resources.

While some progress has been achieved in getting virtual machines to run across different types of hypervisors, more work is still needed to bring them to the level of portability that enterprises are seeking, according to a study released by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA).

The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.

Cisco last week extended its data center product line to support Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 hypervisor and VM management features to more tightly align their respective data center and cloud architectures for joint customers.

In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

Virtual Instruments, whose software and hardware is used to manage data center performance, plans to release the next edition of its VirtualWisdom software in the fourth quarter.

Microsoft has released the latest version of its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) suite of IT management tools, an upgrade that deepens its ability to manage Windows 8 PC deployments.

To further its concentration on software-defined data centers, hybrid clouds and end-user computing, VMware has sold the Protect product family to LANDesk.

A student charts details about which Twitter users won a Google Glass competition and the pitches that got them into the early user circle.

Even if you've never heard of Flextronics you have probably used or benefited from one of the products this global digital equipment manufacturer has helped assemble -- a Microsoft Xbox 360, for example, or components that show up in everything from Cisco and Motorola devices to aerospace and automotive equipment.

With its new Grid VGX software, Nvidia is aiming to tear down the performance barrier that keeps graphics-intensive applications from running on virtual desktops.