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The number of businesses moving toward virtualization is growing constantly, and together they will lead to an important change in the face of IT, according to to VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz. Speaking at his company's VMworld expo on Tuesday, Maritz told his audience that the focus will change from hardware efficiency to operational efficiency, that a new infrastructure will evolve, and that IT must figure out how this infrastructure will be consumed and paid for, among other things.

Trend Micro on Tuesday announced an agentless antimalware module for VMware virtual environments in its Deep Security 7.5 product. The company also announced on Tuesday that it's throwing open its Trend Micro SecureCloud beta to the public. Both products will protect data in the virtual environment as well as in the cloud. Deep Security 7.5 combines agentless antimalware with agentless intrusion detection and agentless Web application protection. Traditionally, security, monitoring and other apps that watch a computing environment plant a small agent into the apps they are watching.

ARM may be comfortably placed in the mobile chip market, but the company is unwilling to rest on its laurels. In recent times, ARM has time and again underlined its interest in the server market. The company hopes to make a dent in the low-power server market with a new chip design that features both virtualization and large physical address support. The next generation of its Cortex-A processor, the Eagle, will be the first to utilize the two key instruction-set extensions that the UK-based chip designer announced at the Hot Chips conference today.

"It's the natural progression of the ARM architecture to move into this domain," said David Brash, ARM's architecture program manager. "We think that that are going to be places for low-power servers, but also new cases." A slide Brash presented at the conference revealed that some of the leading names in the field of server virtualization have already begun developing hypervisor software for the chip design, which is “very close” to being released.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.

Good news for small and midsize businesses -- VMWare has taken a hatchet to its virtualization software package and cut the price in half.

The entry-level virtualization platform, VSphere Essentials, now runs $495 for six CPUs, which amounts to $83 per chip (in case your internal calculator is on the fritz). That's down from $995 for six CPUs.

"The question is what took them so long [to lower prices]," says Information Technology Intelligence Crop (ITIC) analyst Laura Didio. "The answer is they could afford to wait because they had such a big lead on everyone else in the marketplace. They were able to charge a premium, and the users weren't grousing about it too much."

It's not as though VMWare is any stranger to big price cuts, however. Back in 2008, the company started offering its ESXi hypervisor for free, which was one of the biggest pricing changes the company ever made.

Dell has inked an agreement to purchase Scalent, a privately held company specializing in server and data center virtualization management software, the OEM announced.

"Scalent provides a critical building block for our Virtual Integrated System, the most open, capable and affordable converged infrastructure solution available," said Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group. "This acquisition will solidify an important component of our enterprise solution portfolio. We know that Scalent software, in combination with Dell servers, storage and network platforms, provide increased efficiency and value for our customers. Scalent’s open architecture is an example of Dell’s ongoing commitment to provide customers with solutions that don’t lock them into proprietary hardware or gateways."

Dell said it plans to complete the acquisition by the end of the month. Once that happens, the OEM will focus on integrating Scalent's infrastructure software into its existing Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) data center software package.

Image Credit: Dell

Less than three months after announcing a slew of products and services to propel its thrust into the data center market, Dell on Wednesday released several out-of-the-box virtualization solutions targeting both enterprises and SMBs. These are aimed at simplifying virtualization and helping customers cut their costs. In addition to hardware and hypervisors, Dell is offering virtualization, lifecycle and system management capabilities. Dell also announced a set of flexible, modular virtualization consulting services.