Survey reveals SME virtualisation benefits

VMware has released the results of a comprehensive survey on the operational efficiency, disaster preparedness, and use of virtualisation among small-and-medium sized enterprise (SME) IT centres, reports eChannelLine.

The survey found SMEs are achieving a wide range of benefits with virtualisation. The areas in which the most SMEs reported significant improvements were time spent on routine IT administrative tasks (73%), application availability (71%), ability to respond to changing business needs (68%), backup and data protection (67%), business continuity preparedness (67%), and company profitability and growth rate (67%).

"Even a very small business with only a few servers can benefit from virtualisation, and it's easy to get started with free VMware solutions like ESXi," said Joe Andrews, group manager of product marketing at VMware.

It's time for Red Hat partners to look beyond Linux. That's the key message for Red Hat's channel in 2010, according to The VAR Guy.

Plenty of Red Hat resellers have also embraced Red Hat's JBoss middleware, but now the open source company has something new cooking for partners: Hosted desktop virtualisation.

To understand where Red Hat is heading, rewind to the company's Q3 results, which were announced 22 December. Total revenue for the quarter jumped a healthy 18% to $194.3 million. At the time CEO Jim Whitehurst said: “We also continued to introduce new products, including the November [2009] release of RHEV that advances our position in server virtualisation and cloud computing”.

Storage virtualisation solutions provider DataCore Software has introduced disc drives with larger capacities, says One Stop Click.

The company revealed that its virtual discs have expanded in size from 2TB to 1PB, in a move that product marketing director Augie Gonzalez has claimed will "blow the roof off the capacity ceiling".

According to the firm, the requirement has emerged as clients become increasingly eager to group multiple disc drives, as well as update and analyse very large datasets. Gonzalez said the company will make the offering available as soon as possible.