Novell update supports Solaris

Novell is targeting Sun Microsystems customers after announcing its virtual migration software now offers physical-to-virtual support for Solaris 10 OS users, says IT World Canada.

The company said Platespin Migrate 8.1 is a significant update for customers using Solaris Containers, a form of operating system-level virtualisation.

While Microsoft or VMware customers have long enjoyed the ability to move physical workloads to a virtual environment with ease, Solaris users have been saddled with a largely manual process.

VMware has released three products for managing applications in virtual machines, including software to provide service-level reporting and performance management; enable chargeback for virtual workloads; and improve development and test environments, Computer World reports.

One product, vCenter AppSpeed, is the result of VMware's acquisition of application performance vendor B-hive Networks.

VMware says AppSpeed provides service-level reporting and performance management for multitier applications that run in VMs, giving "IT administrators visibility across all tiers of an application, providing views of application performance, usage and dependencies, across both physical and virtual infrastructure."

Cloud computing and virtualisation technologies will influence IT spending in New Zealand over the next few years as businesses look to maintain and improve their systems and processes under enormous financial pressure due to the economic slowdown, writes ITWire.

With businesses either holding back, or reducing spending on IT and looking to get a more cost-effective bang for their buck, it seems that many of New Zealand's CIOs are giving precedence to spending on mission critical projects over non-mission critical projects.

With many organisations revising their IT systems and business processes, within their business planning for the next financial year, in order to optimise their cost structure, the next five years is expected to see only a relatively modest growth rate in IT services spending , with a compound annual growth rate of 3.8%.