Virtualization

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.

WAN optimization has evolved into a complete system that optimizes traffic across a broad range of most popular applications while providing deep visibility into performance.

Desktop virtualization promises many benefits, including simplified and standardized desktop support, greater consistency and control, and better security and compliance.

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.

Securely deleting data in a personal context is hard enough, but it's far more complicated when enterprise storage is involved.

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

Data centers currently face a trend of dramatic changes because they are turning into service organizations.

This guide describes the security challenges within virtualized environments and shows how to apply the concepts of Forrester's Zero Trust Model of information security to secure the virtual environment effectively.

This Technology Spotlight reveals that IT organizations have come to realize that the underlying infrastructure, particularly storage, plays a key role in successfully realizing the benefits of a virtualized applications.