There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices.

The once darling of the software industry, VMWare, is currently struggling to recover to anything close to what it was. With stock once riding high at $124 per share, it is now struggling to break the $40 barrier. VMWare rode the initial wave of the virtualization revolution, producing high quality software to allow you to run and maintain multiple operating systems on one host. They were largely uncompeted for a number of years, but now that the computing world has decided that virtualization is indeed here to stay and will shape our landscape, a number of competitors have appeared, including solutions from Microsoft.

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.

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. Dr Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, Inc., will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Virtualization on Wall Street Conference & Expo will take place on March 22-24, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe who will be converging in New York City to attend this comprehensive meeting on Virtualization on Wall Street.

Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had 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. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling 'Cloud Computing' - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts. Merrill Lynch analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

The world's first journal devoted to the delivery of massively scalable IT resources as a service has been launched by SYS-CON Media, the latest in a series of leading-edge additions to its 25-plus stable of online and print publications such as Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal, Open Web Developer's Journal, and iPhone Developer's Journal.

Likewise Software announced that Isilon Systems is licensing its technology to further streamline the management of mixed storage environments. Likewise Software products deliver state-of-the art authentication and audit capabilities for mixed network environments. Datacenter managers running clustered storage systems on single or mixed operating systems - including Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS - can now more easily manage the provisioning and security of these storage devices.

10gen announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.

Net One Systems and 3Tera announced that the two companies have signed a multi-year agreement naming Net One Systems as the exclusive distributor of 3Tera's AppLogic, the commercial grid OS for cloud computing, in Japan. Starting immediately, Net One Systems will offer cloud computing infrastructure and services using 3Tera's AppLogic. First customer deployments will be announced later this month.

DataCore Software announced that its SANmelody software is serving as the foundation of a replication and disaster recovery (DR) plan at Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC) that was orchestrated by DataCore partner Entisys. The IT environment at ACMC was fundamentally based upon products from Dell and EMC as well as virtual machines from VMware. ACMC is comprised of multiple sites and as a county hospital the organization is under a number of budget constraints. Entisys presented the Citrix XenServer and DataCore SANmelody DR solution based upon XenServer, which provides great savings to the medical center.

Egenera announced that electronic trading systems pioneer NYFIX has standardized on infrastructure virtualization solutions from Egenera. Egenera systems are highly available, flexible platforms that eliminate the need to rigidly dedicate servers to applications. Instead, Egenera's patented Processing Area Network (PAN) replaces server infrastructure with software, and automatically repurposes and reallocates virtual and physical servers on demand, with high availability and disaster recovery.

CEO Hector Ruiz, increasingly blamed for the harrowing of AMD, stepped down during the company's Q2 conference call with Wall Street Thursday in favor of his sidekick, AMD president and patent-carrying engineer Dirk Meyer, the guy who used to run AMD's chip operation and was responsible for the Opteron chip that brought grief to Intel. Since the two have been so closed aligned it is unclear whether the change will make any substantive difference in AMD's fortunes.

BakBone is providing comprehensive, easy-to-manage VMware and heterogeneous data protection solutions for The Latin School of Chicago, helping the school keep its focus on students, rather than data protection. An independent, coeducational day school located on the Near North Side of Chicago, The Latin School of Chicago ranks among the nation's best schools in the informed use of technology in the classroom and for school administration. They utilize technology to support efficient, reliable operation of the school and provide tools that enhance both internal and external communications.

Reflex Security announced the availability of Reflex Virtual Security Center (VSC), pioneering a new level of security through heightened visibility and control for virtualized environments. Reflex VSC provides a single authoritative visual interface to secure the virtual data center. Coupled with the award-winning Reflex Virtual Security Appliance (VSA), the VSC brings essential functionality to round out the Reflex virtual security management solution.

With Gartner predicting that virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, Avnet Technology Solutions furthered its commitment to enable its value-added reseller partners to excel in this fast-growth market. Avnet Technology Solutions, an operating group of Avnet announced a dedicated training program called VirtualPath University for value-added resellers in the United States. Based on Avnet's successful HealthPath University and GovPath University programs, VirtualPath University provides partners with virtualization market understanding, knowledge, technology drivers and tools.

Catbird announced the Certified Virtual Security Professional (CVSP) Program, a professional training and certification program for virtual security. The CVSP program provides IT professionals with in-depth knowledge and tools required for best-practice implementation of security in a virtual environment.

Citrix on Tuesday announced Project Kensho, which is supposed to deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that will let ISVs and enterprise IT folk create portable hypervisor-independent enterprise application workloads that should run across XenServer, Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments. Citrix is expecting to have a free technical preview for download in September.

HP is going into the shipping container business following down the path already trod by Sun and recently IBM and some other smaller firms except HP of course figures it can do these data center add-ons better than its rivals. HP calls its 40-foot containers PODs, short for Performance Optimized Data Centers, and says that unlike its competitors its containers will house rival gear from Dell, Sun, IBM, Cisco and whomever as well as HP's own.

TRANGO Virtual Processors delivers isolation and portability of operating systems and drivers on the TI OMAP 3 platform. The TRANGO Hypervisor offers a broad choice of operating system (OS) and real-time operating system (RTOS) including Linux, Windows Embedded CE, Symbian OS, eCos, uC-OSII, uITRON and other proprietary RTOS, while the OMAP 3 platform, based on ARM Cortex-A8 processor, offers up to 3X performance gain over ARM11 based processors. The combination delivers isolation, flexibility and cost optimization benefits to the design of today's convergent wireless devices.

General Dynamics C4 Systems has selected the OptiPlex 755 desktop by Dell as the computer hardware to host its Trusted Virtual Environment (TVE), a High Assurance Platform (HAP)-compliant workstation intended for classified work by government users. The workstation enables individuals to use a single computer workstation to securely access information and applications from multiple networks, at different classification levels, as opposed to limiting a computer to a single security level.

Trustware unveiled a new version of its powerful security software application, BufferZone Pro 3.0. With close to 2 million installations worldwide, BufferZone has become the de-facto standard for browser and application based virtualization security. By creating a 'buffer zone' between the Internet and the users' local PC environment, consumers can browse the Web, chat on IM, open email attachments, download files and other confidential information - all without the fear of malware attacks.

Ericom announced that its desktop virtualization (VDI) and presentation virtualization (SBC) solution, PowerTerm WebConnect, fully integrates with VMware's free ESXi hypervisor. Currently, PowerTerm WebConnect is one of the only desktop virtualization solution that can manage VMware ESXi without the need to deploy VirtualCenter -- presenting cost-savings for SMBs and enterprises seeking to deploy a virtualized desktop infrastructure.

TRANGO Virtual Processors announced that it has added support for the uITRON RTOS to the growing list of operating systems.hosted by the TRANGO Hypervisor. TRANGO's secure isolation, robust protection of critical data and services, and the company's steadfast commitment to providing the thinnest, lightest hypervisor in the commercial marketplace makes this a compelling solution for applications such as multifunction printers, medical equipment, cell phones, and set top boxes.

AppSense reported a 50 percent increase in U.S. revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008. Its global business - which includes a growing customer base of over 4,000 - realized a 30 percent increase in worldwide revenue, continuing its trend of 30 percent growth each year since 2005.

VMware is moving to create a free version of the VMware ESXi hypervisor. The company's new CEO also plans to delve deeper into cloud computing and expand VMware's virtualization technology reach.

Astaro announced the availability of the Astaro Smart Installer, a new product designed to allow resellers and customers to quickly and easily install Astaro software appliances and re-image Astaro hardware appliances. Available for Astaro Security Gateway and Astaro Web Gateway product lines, the Astaro Smart Installer is a specialized USB flash drive that allows the hardware appliance or server to recognize it as an external CD/ROM drive loaded with a bootable image.

Emulex announced that its LightPulse Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), available from Sun as the Sun StorageTek Enterprise Class 4Gb/s PCI Express HBA, now offer Virtual HBA technology within Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) environments. Enhanced capabilities such as virtual port management, available via Emulex's next generation HBAnyware management suite, are designed to enhance the overall functionality of Solaris Containers.

Aerohive announced the availability of Virtual HiveManager, a new feature of the company's HiveManager network management system (NMS) appliance. Virtual HiveManager provides network management virtualization and permits the flexible delegation of network management authority, including by company or business unit, geographic location, and user role. The capability benefits managed wireless LAN service providers and large, distributed enterprises seeking flexibility in the management of their wireless LANs. Virtual HiveManager is available as a free upgrade to all HiveManager appliance owners.

Interphase Systems announced it has named Lew Smith as Product Manager, Virtualization Solutions. In this newly created position, he will be responsible for leading and building Interphase's virtualization practice and offerings, with a concentration on the key technologies that will benefit the company's customers. Smith will continue to build relationships with existing technology partners, as well as engaging in new partner relationships.

With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture.

Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board.

Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed exactly how much under its promised 50% year-over-year growth 2008 is going to be. It's going to be 5%-8% short of the magic number. Reason of course dictates that 42%-45% growth may some day look heroic.

FalconStor announced its expansion in the Software as a Service (SaaS) market, collaborating with HiNet - the Internet service provider (ISP) arm of Chunghwa Telecom, an information and telecom service provider in Taiwan - to make online backup services available to customers and small-and-medium-size businesses in Taiwan.

Alternative Technology continues to expand its offerings by announcing it will supply a broad range of CA distributed enterprise IT management software. Those offerings include: application & development databases; application performance management; database management; dynamic & virtual systems management; governance, risk & compliance; infrastructure & operations management; IT service & asset management; project, portfolio & financial management; security management; and storage & information governance.

VirtualLogix announced Carrier Grade Virtualization, a solution that meets the performance, security, serviceability and availability needs of next generation, multicore-based carrier grade systems. VirtualLogix Carrier Grade Virtualization reduces the cost and complexity of maintaining carrier grade properties in edge and core network elements such as IP Multimedia System (IMS) nodes. As a result, networking and telecommunication original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can now reuse existing investments in their carrier grade systems while gaining the benefits of using VirtualLogix VLX real-time virtualization software. These benefits include faster adoption of multicore architectures and consolidation of hardware, reduced bill of materials, increased availability, improved time to market, and more efficient designs as a result.

3PAR, the utility storage company, says it's got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage. It's supposed to automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage, hence the name Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI.