FEATURED VIDEO
Sponsored By:
SLIDE SHOWS
As if they needed more stress, organizations are facing evolving and increasingly stringent compliance regulations from the Payment Card Industry, as well as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others. Here are a few security compliance products that can make the audit process less excruciating.
Here are 10 of the distributor's hottest new offerings winning over solution providers.
New smartphones from Sony, Motorola and the first-ever Twitter-only mobile device -- the TwitterPeek -- headline a busy week for handset makers as the holiday shopping season heats up.
INSIDE CHANNELWEB

Sun Makes Virtual Desktop Play With innotek Deal


By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb

2:44 PM EST Tue. Feb. 12, 2008
Sun Microsystems has acquired a small developer of desktop virtualization technology in a move to help funnel more developers and power users to work with the vendor's overall virtualization strategy.

Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., said on Tuesday it entered a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, a Stuttgart, Germany company that has been developing PC virtualization technology since 2001. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The major product of innotek is an open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. VirtualBox, which has been downloaded over 4 million times since January of 2007, enables desktop or laptop PCs running Windows, Linux, Macintosh, or Solaris operating systems to urn multiple different operating systems side-by-side. Users can switch between the operating systems with a mouse click.

Tim Marsland, Sun fellow and one of two CTOs of Sun's Software group, said the acquisition meshes well with other recent Sun open source moves, such as its acquisition last month of open source database developer MySQL.

VirtualBox also plays into Sun's xVM server virtualization strategy, Marsland said. xVM is a hypervisor-based server virtualization platform based on the Xen open source technology.

"Our desire is to reach developers and open a funnel towards us for virtualization," Marsland said. "This also opens desktop virtualization for anyone anywhere."

VirtualBox runs as a hosted hypervisor on top of Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and Solaris operating systems, allowing developers to run their applications on multiple platforms without the need to install and reinstall and reinstall different operating environments, Marsland said.

Power users can also use VirtualBox to run an application they might not normally be able to run. For instance, he said, a Macintosh user might want to run a Windows application occasionally without having a Windows-based PC handy, and could do so by hosting the Windows operating system on the MacOS with VirtualBox.

VirtualBox allows the seamless mixing of operating systems, Marsland said. "On my blog, you can see I have the Windows Media Player running on my Solaris desktop," he said. "It's an example of how seamless the technology is."

 
Channelweb : Promofinder
FEATURED PROMOTIONS
Avnet 0% Lease Promotion
The Avnet Capital Solutions “0% Lease Promotion” has been extended to December 31, 2009! This offering significantly reduces ...
Double Your Money!
Cash Rewards - DOUBLED!
RELATED BLOG >>
Photo
Xobni fills the gaps in Microsoft Outlook with more efficient organization of contact information, building profiles that allow users to quickly find the people with whom they're trying to connect.
ADVERTISEMENT




CHANNEL SERVICES >>