Dell on Monday announced it has agreed to acquire virtualized storage provider 3PAR for about US$1.15 billion, a move that will boost its capabilities for building public and private cloud computing environments. The deal is expected to close later this year.

Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

If vendors including Cisco and HP succeed, in a few years you may buy more bundled chunks of infrastructure, and fewer individual server, storage and network pieces. Here's a look at how virtualization is significantly changing server purchases.

Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

Desktop virtualization makes it possible to centralize control and simplify management, improve security and compliance, and minimize help desk calls. It isn't perfect for all types of users within the enterprise, but when deployed appropriately, VDI can unlock new capabilities that could never be achieved through traditional physical desktop solutions.

By HP Networking

Riverbed has products on tap that will enable WAN optimization as a cloud service, speed up the boot time for remote virtual desktops and, perhaps in a year or two, a software client that will speed up the performance of handhelds and smartphones.

VMware subsidiary SpringSource has launched a new version of its Hyperic software

Has the dearth of management tools held you back from deploying virtualization on a Linux platform? Now there is an enterprise version of the open source management software ConVirt that actually exceeds the base feature set of VMWare's vCenter. ConVirt 2.0 Enterprise might be just the tool you need to help Linux flourish in your virtualized data center.

In the wake of an analyst report certifying Citrix's XenDesktop 4.1 as the only product that fully satisfies all the criteria for enterprise-class desktop virtualization, Citrix Systems has come very close to conceding it will remain an also-ran in the market for virtual servers.