VMware raises virtualisation bar

VMware has changed the name of its flagship VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere 4, and in the process has added new switching and management features that raise the bar for x86 data centre virtualisation technology, says eWeek.

The VMware marketing team has been working overtime to promote vSphere 4 as the first cloud operating system.

IT managers can safely set aside this breathless chatter and focus on the fact that vSphere will allow IT departments to place application workloads on the most cost-effective compute resource.

Cisco plans to grow and evolve its community of data centre channel partners and customers in order to accelerate the market transition toward virtualised data centres, states Trade Arabia.

The company is already expanding its data centre network across the region, with an office having opened recently in Bahrain.

Cisco is now building on this, introducing several channel programmes designed to help partners gain new revenue opportunities and evolve their businesses toward a unified data centre practice.

Sun Microsystems has introduced an updated version of OpenSolaris that includes Project Crossbow, a network stack for a multiprocessor and multithreaded approach that will result in faster networking, reports InformationWeek.

The new release is called OpenSolaris 2009.6, a nomenclature that borrows from Ubuntu's practice of using the year and month of the year that a new release comes out.

The Project Crossbow capabilities take advantage of multithreading to speed instruction passing and message handling on heavily virtualised servers.