CIOs focus on virtualisation

According to Gartner, virtualisation is the number one priority for CIOs worldwide in 2010, reports Information Week.

Given the low budgets and an increasing pressure to do more with less, CIOs across the world are moving to virtualisation to increase their server utilisation ratios from 15% to 20% to as high as 80%.

However, security concerns are still holding back a large number of server virtualisation deployments. Trend Micro is eyeing this emerging market and has become the first security vendor to offer security for virtualised environments.

Citrix's VDI technology technology has surged ahead of rival VMware's, according to the Burton Group, which says Citrix's XenDesktop software is the first "enterprise-ready" server-hosted virtual desktop product, writes Computerworld.

The Burton Group claims server-hosted VDI platforms need 52 specific features to be deemed enterprise-ready, and that an update Citrix made this week makes it the first to meet all of them.

Previously, XenDesktop was missing role-based access controls and administrative change logging capabilities, which are necessary to provide an audit trail for administrative actions. The initial release of XenDesktop 4 also lacked a suitable enterprise-class support policy, according to the Burton Group.

Extreme Networks says co-location provider Profitability.net has chosen its virtualised 10Gb data centre, cloud and storage networking solutions as it rolls out its Appica.com cloud service, according to PRWire.

Profitability.net provides data centre, hosted application, and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service services for 450-plus emerging Fortune 1000 companies. Profitablity.net is unveiling Appica.com to provide public and private cloud servers and storage.

With Appica.com, customers can eliminate costly virtualisation projects and simply add and remove servers and storage as needed.