Virtual Intelligence Briefing

APPASSURE SOFTWARE EXPANDS GOVERNMENT BUSINESS WITH IMMIXGROUP GSA CONTRACT

VIB — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:24:59 +0000

Public Sector, Including U.S. Federal Government, is Strategic Focus Area for

AppAssure Software in 2012 and Beyond

Reston, VA, Jan. 20, 2012

AppAssure Software, the global leader and award-winning developer of unified backup, replication and recovery software for VM, physical and Cloud environments, announced today its partnership with immixGroup, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise technology products and services in the government marketplace.
AppAssure’s products have received final approval and are now listed on immixGroup’s General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule.
Through this partnership, AppAssure’s solutions are now available to its customers and channel partners through immixGroup.
This relationship also enables the public sector to procure AppAssure’s solutions off Government Wide Acquisition contracts and other contract vehicles in place at immixGroup.
AppAssure provides the fastest unified and application-aware backup and replication software for virtual, physical and cloud environments. AppAssure is based on three innovative and groundbreaking technologies:

Live Recovery™– instant recovery for near-zero RTO and RPO for VM and physical servers.
Recovery Assure™– sets a new standard in data protection with automatic recovery testing and verification technology, assuring the recoverability of every backup in VM and physical environments.
Universal Recovery™– cross-platform recovery that restores backups from anywhere to anywhere: from physical to virtual, virtual to virtual, or virtual to physical, as well as bare-metal recovery to dissimilar hardware (P2V, V2V, V2P); it includes granular object-level recovery with application-item and file-level recovery.

Quotes:
AJ Narula, Director of Federal Sales, AppAssure Software

“AppAssure’s Backup, Replication and Recovery Software plays extremely well to support two major Federal mandates – the FDCCI (Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative) and CloudFirst. The relationship with immixGroup lays the foundation for AppAssure’s public sector channel program by providing our partner ecosystem with easy access to contract vehicles such as the GSA Schedule 70. I believe this relationship is a win-win for our customers, partners, immixGroup and AppAssure.”

Art Richer, President, immixGroup
“We are excited to support AppAssure’s entry into the public sector market. Government customers will now have reliable access to AppAssure’s products through the contract vehicles they prefer.”

Connect with AppAssure:

Website: http://www.appassure.com
Blog: http://blog.appassure.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppAssure
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AppAssure

Additional Web Links:

To learn more about backup, replication & recovery software, go to:http://www.appassure.com/solutions/backup-software-for-government/
To download a free trial of AppAssure’s backup, replication & recovery software, go to:http://go.appassure.com/free-trial

About immixGroup, Inc.

immixGroup helps technology companies do business with the government. The company’s four divisions deliver a unique combination of services for software and hardware manufacturers, their channel partners, and government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. Since 1997, immixGroup has helped hundreds of large and emerging companies grow and manage their public sector business while providing its government customers with reliable access to leading commercial technologies through the contract vehicles and partners they prefer. For more information, contact immixGroup, Inc. at 703.752.0610, via email at info@immixgroup.com, or on the Web at www.immixgroup.com.

About AppAssure Software
AppAssure, the global leader in complete server, data and application protection, for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures, delivers customer-proven backup and replication software that assures the recovery of applications in minutes. AppAssure’s groundbreaking technology uniquely guarantees instant and 100% reliable data and application recovery from your server to your datacenter – to your cloud. AppAssure’s innovative software permits VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, Windows Server backup, Microsoft Exchange Server backup, and goes beyond protecting data, to protecting entire applications in both virtual and physical environments, enabling service providers and enterprises to adopt a cloud model to deliver fast, reliable and secure data protection. AppAssure is an Elite VMware Technology Alliance Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. With 3,450% growth over the past three years and more than 5,000 customers, partners and service providers in over 50 countries, AppAssure is the world’s fastest growing backup and replication software company, ranked by Inc. Magazine. The company has now posted 18 consecutive quarters of growth. Learn more about AppAssure Software by visiting http://www.appassure.com/.

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Media Contact:

Ann McDonough

AppAssure Software

AMcDonough@appassure.com

+1-866-459-6653

VDI Tip #5: Establish a cross-silo operational model to proactively manage performance

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:17:55 +0000

Take a look at this diagram and consider the idea that any one of the items on the outside of this wheel could be placed at the center so that we could see the whole world from the perspective of a virtual desktop. We could see the perspective of the world from a storage array looking back at the desktops or at other servers. We could look at a particular protocol and see what devices were implementing or using that protocol. It’s this 360 degree visibility that actually enables you to traverse the whole virtual infrastructure and quickly spot problems in a proactive and meaningful way.

For example, if we put the virtual desktop in the center of the universe. We understand how it talks to other virtual machines, it’s back end storage and what network issues may be affecting its application delivery. On the other hand, we could just as easily put a protocol into the center of the world and understand how PCoIP is being affected by perhaps file sharing traffic going across the WAN or a large corporate video chat that is happening at the time.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://xangati.typepad.com/xangati/2012/01/vdi-tip-5-establish-a-cross-silo-operational-model-to-proactively-manage-performance.html

Calls for cloud security transparency getting louder

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:09:12 +0000

Cloud security transparency today equates to a non-disclosure-agreement discussion between an enterprise and service provider over the provider’s controls. The end result may satisfy the customer and lead to business for the provider, but the process isn’t efficient for either side.

Calls for cloud transparency, however, continue to resonate as IT evolves and moves onto cloud computing platforms, attractive for their efficiency and elasticity. Enterprises moving applications and data to the cloud, or consuming a provider’s services, need to understand cloud provider security. But providers remain hesitant to give up proprietary information, or expose themselves to exploit.

The Cloud Security Alliance’s Security Trust and Assurance Registry, or STAR, is the closest thing to a standards-based effort meeting this need. STAR launched in the fourth quarter of last year and its aim is to be a public repository of providers’ security controls. Providers who are STAR members can fill out either the CSA’s Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire or the Cloud Controls Matrix framework questionnaire, both built according to the ISO 27001 standard, and ultimately agree to have that data published online and publicly accessible.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240114155/Calls-for-cloud-security-transparency-getting-louder

Moving enterprise apps to and from clouds

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:54:25 +0000

Virtualization Management Blog

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:51:04 +0000

Capacity planning is a simple concept that is pretty much the same everywhere, right? Well, we don’t think so. We believe that an activity as important as capacity planning must provide an accurate projection of the expected resource demand levels for each workload (as in, it absolutely has to be ‘performance-based’). Additionally, that same planning activity should tell us exactly how (where) to allocate that workload (VMs to physical hosts) and those recommendations should take into account a wide array of parameters that are often overlooked by ‘capacity based’ algorithms

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.vmturbo.com/blog/bid/73934/Video-Capacity-Planning-Done-Right

Hot Topics and Product Training Webinars

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:46:09 +0000

Real-Time Visibility into Your Environment
Stratusphere UX provides desktop visibility to desktop administrators who need to deliver applications and data to users with a consistent user experience on a virtualized and highly converged network. Stratusphere UX tracks hundreds of metrics for a highly accurate, objective and methodical way to measure users’ experience. Compare platforms, protocols, endpoints, storage, network, and resource pool reservations — by application, user, group, and over custom time periods. Unlike solutions that only monitor system resources, Stratusphere UX goes beyond to pulse user, group and application usage, hardware and software inventory for Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View environments as well as physical Windows PCs, endpoints, related infrastructure servers and storage as well as support for various Linux distributions.

Jan. 13th @ 1:00 PM EST Sign me up

Jan. 18th @ 8:00 AM EST Sign me up

Legacy Profiles to Windows 7 in 7 Seconds: Anytime Migration™ to Win 7 made Easy
Windows 7 migration from Windows XP/2000 and Server 2003 is essential to ensure that your organization’s staff does not experience any loss of data or desktop personalization. Jumping into Windows 7 without a migration plan can cause major headaches including: data loss, productivity loss, and user adoption hesitation. Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity provides your organization with a clear path to Windows 7 or any other next generation desktop that you are planning.

Jan. 11th @ 8:00 AM EST Sign me up

Jan. 25th @ 1:30 PM EST Sign me up

VDI Assessments from Start to Finish
Thinking about VDI? Moving users to virtual desktops? We’ll share our best practices for VDI Assessment & Design as we walk you through the process of using Stratusphere FIT to design your next virtual desktop transformation.

Jan. 12th @ 1:00 PM EST Sign me up

Jan. 26th @ 8:00 AM EST Sign me up

Building Custom Reports for Stratusphere UX
For advanced users who want to customize Stratusphere reports using advanced reporting techniques including SQL

Jan. 19th @ 2:00 PM EST Sign me up

Jan. 20th @ 1:00 PM EST Sign me up

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ISVs caught in the chasm: between heaven and earth — SaaS and on-premises

VIB — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:41:05 +0000

In its 2011 research report “Cloud Computing Takes Off,” Morgan Stanley is bullish on the future of PaaS stating, “The low capex requirements, robust cloud enablement and rapidly improving developer toolsets are significantly lowering the barriers to entry for new application development [emphasis mine] – both in terms of cost and time to market.

The SaaS/on-premises tension sets up a complex series of challenges for the ISV including questions of business models, maintenance of multiple product versions, and updating of software to name a few issues. With apologies to last century’s poet Robert Frost, smart money may rest on the ultimate victory of SaaS, but there are miles to go before on-premises sleeps.

The intended audience for this paper is anyone responsible for generating software sales revenue, supporting a software sales cycle, or implementing software for a customer. Independent software vendor (ISV) sales, professional services, and sales engineers will be particularly interested in how AppZero software can directly impact the sales cycle, while IT professionals will find advantages in the time saved throughout the product lifecycle.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://blog.appzero.com/blog/isvs-caught-chasm-between-heaven-and-earth-saas-and-premises

Virtualization Survey – Chance to Win an Ipad2

VIB — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:32:24 +0000

Virtual Intelligence would like to invite you to take part in an industry survey regarding the current state of deployment, organizational intentions, and impediments to the widespread adoption of virtualization, cloud computing and networking.

The survey should take just 5 to 10 minutes.

If you are interested in participating, please click the link below.

SURVEY LINK

VMware VI3 Network Communication Diagram

VIB — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:16:34 +0000

This diagram is extremely helpful in troubleshooting network issues and also in helping put your companies security department at ease.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/12/15/vmware-vi3-network-communication-diagram/

Adjusting VMware View’s PCoIP for video intense applications

VIB — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:08:01 +0000

Last week a Unidesk customer emailed us asking about poor performance in an Auto-CAD application on a PCoIP thin client. Everything else in the desktop seemed fine except this application. I then received an email from a customer asking how to improve video (like Youtube) in their View/Unidesk environment (when it rains it pours right?).

After finding Andre Leibovici’s (twitter @andreleibovici) article on these settings we began playing with them and doing further research. We then found the View 5 documents on the bandwidth variables and session variables available in the View ADM templates.

But, what we wanted to see was what these settings could improve in something like a full screen video playing back from Youtube. I mean if you just set the settings and see no difference in the video, whats the use?

To test this I recorded my PCoIP session watching the Armageddon trailer on Youtube with the default PCoIP settings. I then re-rerecorded the same desktop with some additional PCoIP “tuning” to see if the video playback got any better.