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5/30/2008
When you have most of the marbles, it never hurts to have a few more. For industry leader VMware, the challenge is well defined: Stay ahead of the pack by maintaining market share; keep building the value-added areas of virtualization where high growth is most likely to take place; fill gaps in the existing portfolio; and move toward the company's vision of automated virtual data centers.
VMware's acquisition of B-hive is consistent with those goals, especially the last. B-hive is an application performance management company with headquarters in San Mateo, CA. The 3-year-old, privately held company's core product is the Conductor, which it describes as the first Service Level Control solution for virtualized environments.
Target markets have included retailers and financial organizations. According to Bogomil Balkansky, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Vmware, the company has already been working with B-hive as a partner and much of the current level of product integration is already in place through open API development.
B-hive Conductor is a virtual appliance that resides in the data center and monitors the response time of user transactions and applications, as well as utilization levels of virtual machines. It also provides real-time resource allocation.
Used in conjunction with VMware's existing management tools, Conductor can pinpoint degradations in application response time and dynamically reallocate virtual resources. This includes the ability to migrate applications to a different server, and provisioning additional VMs if necessary.
VMware plans to use the technology to augment customer deployments for both servers and desktops. In addition, B-hive's research and development facility in Israel will form the basis for a new VMware research and development center. Balkansky told Virtualization Review that plans for the R & D projects to be carried out are still being finalized.
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The Digital Arts Alliance, a consortium led by the Pearson Foundation that promotes digital arts in K-12 education, is expanding its membership with the addition of Fordham University. This follows on the heels of three other organizations joining the group back in July--the National Education Association (NEA) Foundation, the Foundation for Investor Education, and Employers For Education Excellence (E3).
Opinions are mixed on what the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) DSS 1.2 standard will mean for security pros going forward. However, the mandate is clear: protect data.
Research teams from six universities have been selected by NASA to become members of its Astrobiology Institute with the aim of exploring the "origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." Teams were each awarded five-year grants, averaging $7 million each, according to NASA.
Amazon announced Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon expects to offer companies the ability to run their applications on EC2 using Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server sometime in the fall, according to an announcement issued by the company.
Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution can require "difficult or even painful behavioral challenges" for administrators in higher education, according to Nicole Engelbert, a lead analyst with research and analysis firm Datamonitor. "It means re-orienting yourself to your students. That can be tough, so you need to be ready for that."
Here's a bit of trivia for your next high-tech happy hour: A "nog" (in addition to being a Christmas favorite) is a wooden block built into a masonry wall so that joinery structure can be nailed to it. For the founders of Piscataway, N.J.-based startup Bluenog this obscure bit of carpentry nomenclature was the perfect metaphor for an integrated software suite that includes a content management system (CMS), rich portal features and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.