International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

Virtual Cloud Computing represents the next wave of virtualization and offers significant market opportunities by providing a new, simpler, and much more pervasive platform for on-demand, desktop and application service delivery. While server-side virtualization helps enterprises optimize data center resources, the use of a universal dialtone technology offers a significantly larger market for desktop users in both commercial and consumer segments. The key to virtual cloud computing is in the universal dialtone which securely links users to desktop applications and content resources, on demand, via any device.

With cloud computing becoming ever more prevalent in the consumer space for rapidly scaling Web 2.0 applications, grid computing finally delivers similarly efficient scalability to the business world. Grid computing is an impressive, confident, powerful technology model, winning high-profile admirers as it approaches full maturity.

By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the 'next IBM' and why Google is not the 'next Microsoft' - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors, like Zoho, to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled last week. As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore s Law on these computing eras.

I/O is a key element of server architecture, but its virtualization is only now starting to be addressed. Without I/O virtualization, the amount, type and physical connectivity of server I/O are all fixed. In order to achieve true flexibility in server usage, these fixed resources must become dynamic. This enables an on-demand usage model for non-virtualized servers, including failover with shared spares, and server pool scaling. It is also an important complement to virtual machine technology, providing flexible dedicated I/O pipes for virtual machines. This presentation will compare different approaches to I/O virtualization and discuss the applications of the technology.

As virtualization becomes more widely deployed, and enterprises look for new ways to leverage this revolutionary technology, the consumption and delivery of this technology is changing. It is no longer one-size-fits-all and confined to a specific area of the data center, but instead is proliferating within the data center and out to the user via the desktop and applications. This session will provide IT organizations with a short - and long - term roadmap by focusing on the new delivery models for virtualization (including embedded hypervisors and managed services), what's available today and what can be expected in the future, and best practices for deployment.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

The need for a way to more effectively manage and reduce the complexity of end points has never been greater. While virtualization technologies offer a breakthrough approach to reduce the complexities of managing end points, there are different ways organizations are leveraging this technology. This session discusses the distinct differences between how organizations are approaching virtualizing end points and the benefits each implementation offers for gaining the performance, security and control needed to manage end points for today's dispersed organizations.

Does virtualization matter? Can virtual desktops go beyond the sum of the virtual parts? What is the business value and at what price? As server virtualization continues to gain deeper traction and provide benefits beyond server consolidation, desktop virtualization is widely expected to follow a similar trajectory and address many of the challenges associated with enterprise desktops. Virtual desktops hold the promise of increased business agility at reduced complexity and cost, while providing high fidelity user experience at a lower carbon footprint. How is this promise delivered? This session explores the current technology trends, business scenarios and economic imperatives that are shaping the future of virtual desktops, enabling new delivery and consumption models.

Open-Xchange and Parallels are integrating Open-Xchange open source email and collaboration software with Parallels technology to deliver a cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative to commercial email and collaboration products at a competitive price. The products, which will be fully integrated with Parallels Automation solutions, will be offered to end-users via hosting and service providers.

eApps Hosting announced that the GlassFish Open Source Application Server for Java EE 5, from the GlassFish community project, is now available as a click installable application service in low cost Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plans. The eApps Hosting service has supported Java since 1999, when the company's Tomcat hosting plans were launched. In 2001 a Java hosting service using JBoss, a J2EE compliant Java application server, was offered.

Virtualization is a no-brainer for medium to large companies. In today's world server sprawl has become a major problem and costs companies a lot of money not only on server hardware, but power, cooling, support, and square footage. Virtualization potentially addresses all those issues.

I am curious about something - how many organizations are using a single physical host with VMs across different security zones? See, this is something that I would never recommend, and to me it seems like physically segregating your security zones into different virtualization environments solves a fair number of the concerns about the 'dynamic data centers' created by VMotion, VMware DRS, and VMware HA. Or am I overlooking a critical aspect?

Virtualization is the future of IT management, but what exactly does that mean to your organization? CIOs around the world recognize that virtualization could be the answer to combating skyrocketing costs associated with managing their IT infrastructure; however, many are still left wondering how to implement a long-term, sustainable virtualization strategy. In this session, BMC Software CTO, Tom Bishop, will explain how IT organizations can realize the full value of virtualization through aligning IT with business priorities and automating IT processes.

Businesses that virtualize can increase efficiency and reduce costs by eliminating low- performance/low-efficienc y servers. Less well-known, but equally important, is the parallel advantage of streamlining the legacy power and cooling systems that support virtualized environments. This presentation will discuss how new power and cooling technologies and effective data center planning and design are saving additional electrical costs, sometimes even more than the original savings from virtualization. Learn how to help manage the complexities of a virtualized environment by answering the not-so-obvious questions 'Where should I locate my next server?' and 'Where should I migrate my applications to maximize efficiency?'

Join us for an interactive discussion presented by Scalent Systems, as we address the big three challenges facing server failover - software configuration, network connectivity and storage access - and contrast several different approaches, from traditional backup to the use of virtual machines, to the next generation of infrastructure virtualization and management.

The session will describe the use of system aggregation, a revolutionary virtualization technology that allows end-users to get access to a large shared memory system built using multiple off-the-shelf x86 systems. Aggregation provides organizations with better price/performance compared to traditional symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems, and lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to clusters. This new virtualization technology for high-end computing takes advantage of the traditional SMP operating model such as ease of installation and management, as well as large memory, while maintaining the cost structure of x86 clusters.

As more and more enterprises and ISVs seek additional ways to leverage virtualization technology, virtual lab automation (VLA) has emerged as an innovative solution for streamlining software development and automating the entire development and test environment setup while utilizing existing server virtualization infrastructure. Additionally, VLA improves resource utilization and efficiency while pushing products to market faster. This presentation will review the virtual test and development infrastructure and provide best practice recommendations for how VLA can add significant value to developers, testers and IT operations staff and help drive business growth and employee productivity.

How can virtualization help transform your IT environment into a dynamic datacenter? In this Virtualization Keynote, Dr Stephen Herrod will explore how a virtualized IT infrastructure gives any organization a sustainable competitive advantage. We have reached a point in time, Herrod believes, when the industry is shifting and the true power of virtualization is being unleashed, allowing for reduced costs, more efficient use of resources, increased availability of applications and faster responsiveness to business needs.

The conference theme of the Virtualization Conference & Expo Europe, to be held in London, England, January 26-27, 2009, is 'Deploying Virtualization in the Enterprise.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

As governments and corporations intensify their focus on reducing energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions, pressure to improve data center energy efficiency will continue to grow. We believe that the following four Rs must play an essential role in the development of any initiative to create a green data center: Regain power and cooling capacity, Recapture resiliency, Reduce energy costs and Recycle end-of-of-life equipment. Successful organizations will make these four Rs their mantra. And in doing so, their ongoing efforts to think green will help keep their companies operating in the black.

As computer grids are becoming more wide spread in commercial data centers, the bottlenecks in application performance move from raw processing to searching, storing and retrieving the data. In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) technology solves this fundamental problem by acting as super-efficient application accelerator, taking advantage of unused resources readily available on the grid - disk, memory, IO - to put the data in memory of the same computer that performs the calculations. The talk will explore how IMDG can be easily integrated with existing enterprise grids to create data-aware grid applications and provide application performance acceleration while improving application scalability and reliability.

This session will focus on Application Virtualization with particular focus on achieving Web-scale. The session will compare and contrast external cloud deployment to internal deployment on commodity infrastructure.

Virtualization has taken hold in the data center, addressing some of the most pressing issues customers face including excessive power and cooling, and low server utilization. But this is only the first wave of virtualization and only addresses the server. What's next? Enter 'Virtualization 2.0,' where the benefits extend from capital cost reduction to lower operational expenses, improved service levels, agility and IT simplicity. This next wave virtualizes beyond the server, encompassing data center infrastructure (storage, networking and processing) to unbind applications from servers and create a fully agile data center. This session explores Virtualization 2.0 and what it will mean for bottom line business.

There is plenty of discussion about virtualization, but who does it really benefit? How can enterprises adopt virtualization technologies to address real business problems? Is virtualization just another consolidation technology? How are other businesses using virtualization? Is there more that it can do to drive competitive advantage, business efficiency, security and compliance? Drawing on the industry's most in-depth independent research into virtualization to date, Andi Mann, senior analyst from Enterprise Management Associates, will help you to understand what are the key business drivers for virtualization, where to expect significant benefits and how to make sure that virtualization delivers strategic advantages.

This presentation will compare and contrast Web application virtualization solutions such as WebSphere Extended Deployment and hardware virtualization solutions. Particular emphasis will be provided on how the two solutions can be combined to provide the most flexible Web application hosting environment.

At Marathon Technologies, we service a range of industries that must have their applications up and running at all times, or as we call it: vAvailable. vAvailable is the integration of virtualization and high availability technologies to create a cost-effective solution that ensures applications won't go down. With virtualization technologies, high availability has now launched well between today's alternative solutions such as clustering. This session will define vAvailable and this is a huge step between today?s alternatives. Mr. Melnick will discuss a new standard for application availability using virtualization technology that embraces Windows and business process applications.

Today, many organizations hear the term virtualization and still only think of the technology used in a datacenter. While this might be where virtualization started and has received a lot of attention, the next wave of virtualization is happening in connected devices through embedded technologies. When applied, virtualization allows organizations and developers working with front-end connected devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and WiMax base stations, to experience business benefits such as reduced bill-of-material costs, faster time-to-market and richer, more functional designs that feature reduced power, improved security and greater reliability.

As a technology provider that helps application companies embrace cloud computing by virtualizing the applications to run on any cloud, I was a bit disappointed with Google's appengine announcement. It appears that Google is embracing the 'walled garden' approach of salesforce.com and Microsoft instead of the cloud approach of Amazon.

There has been much speculation about the security posture of virtualized environments. One identified vulnerability is the 'hypervisor' threat in which a hacker can break out of a guest OS and onto the host OS of a server. How great a danger is the hypervisor threat? What security barriers should IT erect before and after they implement their virtual environment? Virtual security expert Hezi Moore will help attendees separate the virtualized wheat from the real chaff.

The ultimate goal of virtualization is to increase the utilization and efficiency of your current infrastructure. To that end, one should consider virtualizing the entire data center, including the traditional servers and storage, but also bringing in networking, cable management, power management, cooling/airflow capabilities, etc. This allows for extreme flexibility and agility in terms of managing the infrastructure to the point of being able to roll in and out entire racks of equipment without needing an electrician to add power outlets, without adjusting tile placement for airflow, without pulling extra cable runs, etc ... basically roll it in, plug it in, connect the network/FC cables, power up and go, all within 30-45 minutes. Additionally, efficiency and power savings are very critical in the design and architecture phases, making sure to provide as much power to the IT equipment and as little to the supporting infrastructure as possible. By utilizing a management framework based upon ITIL, and having the proper expertise with ISV applications, security, H/A and BC/DR, one can manage these new capabilities with greater ease and better cost control.

Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be this close to buying Electronic Data Systems for somewhere in the heady neighborhood of $12 billion-$13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, a pretty premium over its $9.5 billion market cap Friday. The paper thinks there could be an announcement on Tuesday. Buying the consultant is meant to help HP compete on the services side against rival IBM.

'Virtualization is already widely used, but primarily for the first-order benefit, namely server consolidation,' notes Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, in this Exclusive Q&A with Virtualization Journal. 'The second-order benefits of agility, availability and manageability of the IT stack are now becoming better understood,' Crosby continues, 'and as a consequence virtualization has moved from a tactical tool for gaining immediate savings, to become a key strategic theme for every IT department.'

With a remote workforce, either through offshoring business processes or remote home workers, it is essential to keep the data safe while providing the most flexible computing experience. This session will discuss the strategies and pitfalls when building a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). It will discuss cost issues and help customers build a compelling Retrun On Investment through determining the Total Cost of Ownership of a VDI implementation. This session will also cover the strategic architecture and how to build a VDI Solution that will allow an Organization to reap the benefits of a remote workforce.

To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.

When it comes to defining the role of virtualization, there are two camps: 1) Virtualization is a platform - represented by VMware; 2) Virtualization is a feature - represented by Parallels, Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, SUN, Novell, Oracle.

There appear to be basically two views on how virtualization will affect the future development of operating systems and computing environments in the personal computing space. One camp believes that virtualization functionality will be present within the operating system. The other camp believes it will be outside the operating system, perhaps in the form of a hypervisor or thin virtualization layer that resides 'below' the OS and governs access to hardware.

With the rapid deployment of server virtualization technology in the data center, IT management is actively looking at optimizing their SAN storage architecture to reap the full benefits of their virtualization investment, such as workload mobility and disaster recovery, without running into I/O bottlenecks and unpredictable utilization of SAN resources that comes with a much more dynamic environment. This session will explore how Data Center Fabric enables virtual servers and physical servers to stand on an equal footing. It will also discuss capabilities specifically designed to support virtualized environments such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen.

Virtualization is not a new story; its technologies allow companies to meet new business needs and say goodbye to underutilized hardware platforms, power consumption, server sprawl and spiraling IT costs. The technology is here and the benefits are already proving to be fruitful. However, these benefits are only possible if effective management tools are in place. This session will discuss virtualization's missing link - data center automation - and how organizations can use it to create an agile, policy-based environment to automate and orchestrate virtual machine lifecycle management. For without proper management, companies only have a piece of the virtualization puzzle.