VMware hits the road

VMware will visit 150 cities in the US and Canada with its VMware Express mobile data centre to show businesses what its desktop virtualisation and cloud computing products can do for them, reports eWeek.

VMware is taking its desktop virtualisation and cloud computing products on the road. Company officials say they are packing products such as View for desktop virtualisation, the vSphere virtualisation platform, and the vCenter Server virtualisation management offering in the mobile data centre.

The travelling road show is being sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, MDS Micro, NetApp and Xsigo.

Virtualisation can introduce power and cooling challenges that can play havoc with a data centre, said the director of Emerson Network Power, Peter Spiteri, according to Computerworld.

Server virtualisation can reduce IT costs, enhance performance and improve data centre space utilisation, but it can also introduce power and cooling challenges than can limit an organisation's ability to realise the opportunities.

“The biggest concern is that, up until virtualisation consolidation, you could get away with a fair bit. The loading didn't need to be so perfect, it didn't matter so much if the room wasn't positively pressured," Spiteri said. "The big issue now is you can't get away with it; when you get a thermal runaway, the issues could be catastrophic.”

Iomart hosting, a managed services provider in the UK, is using DataCore's SANsymphony solution to provide the high-availability backbone for iomart's hosted customers, according to DABCC.

Iomart hosting offers managed services ranging from a single server to complex managed environments. As such, it needed to identify a high-availability solution that would fulfil its 24x7, 100% uptime customer guarantee, while remaining equally robust across their current heterogeneous storage environment.

Twenty-five people operate from within iomart's five data centres located in London, Maidenhead, Glasgow, Nottingham and Leicester.