A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs.

In today's economic environment, enterprises are under increased pressure to make data centers more cost effective in terms of capital and operational expenses. The network is playing a key role in reducing data center complexity so that companies can achieve those savings.

CA and VMware are going to jointly develop a management solution and, to start, have signed a deal to make CA Data Center Automation Manager interoperate with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed so enterprises and cloud service providers can seamlessly provision applications and resources from both corporate datacenter and service provider clouds. VMware has been talking to CIOs and that's how they see themselves using clouds.

LITTLETON, MA--(Marketwire - November 19, 2008) - Akorri, Inc., the leader in performance and capacity management for the virtualized data center, today announced the availability of the BalancePoint™ Plug-In for VMware vCenter -- a new capability sold with its award-winning BalancePoint software solution that allows VMware administrators to use BalancePoint directly from their VMware vCenter console, simplifying the management of virtualized environments.

In a dynamic data center, workloads move from one location to another as needed to ensure they're provided with the resources required to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs). Live migration -- or the displacement of a virtual machine (VM) from one host to another while it's running -- is a core requirement for the dynamic data center. VMware offers live migration through its VMotion feature, and Citrix offers it through XenMotion. Microsoft will offer a similar feature, called Live Migration, in the Windows Server 2008 R2 release of Hyper-V (currently scheduled for 2010).

Liquid Computing's CTO Mike Kemp Discusses Virtualizing the Complete IT Infrastructure at Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 West

Visa is looking for a few good people to run its next-generation data centers. In July, the electronic payments company posted a job listing on the Data Center Job Board for a senior facilities engineer in Virginia to ensure the smooth operation and launch of new state-of-the-art data centers.

Visa is looking to mimic the 2006 launch of its Operations Center Central (OCC) processing facility in Denver in other data centers around the globe. Visa is pushing the envelope of virtualization in that facility and two others in different locations.

As part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, Cisco is collaborating with VMware to deliver a tested and validated solution for Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs) designed specifically to help customers improve the security, scalability and management of storage networks attached to VMware environments. The Cisco vision for Data Center 3.0 entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.

Tier1 Research: Global Multi-Tenant Internet Datacenter Market Stays on Growth Path

An expert covers the pros and cons of two tools, VMware Capacity Planner and PlateSpin PowerRecon, that replace educated guesses about server buys with metrics. Consultant Paul Davey has seen guesswork about server buys for virtualization lead to server glut and higher energy costs, the very things virtualization can prevent.