Roundup: VMware, Akamai, Peak10, Raritan

Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

VMware to Acquire Zimbra. Virtualization leader VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo Inc.  With over 55 million mailboxes, Zimbra products offer a full enterprise feature set to small and large environments, with on-premise or hosted service options.  “Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience,” said Brian Byun, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, VMware. Under terms of the agreement Yahoo! can continue to use Zimbra technology in services, but VMware will purchase the technology and intellectual property.  Yahoo acquired Zimbra for $350 million in 2007.  The acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010.  Financial details were not disclosed.

Akamai Implementation for Autotrader.com. Akamai Technologies announced that AutoTrader.com has implemented a number of Akamai services to support the growth of its online business.  Akamai said its Dynamic Site Accelerator and Web Application Accelerator have shown a 2X improvement in performance, enabling the site to load twice as fast as before and data center traffic offload exceeding 80 percent.  Mark Tuttle, Senior Manager of Engineering at AutoTrader.com said "having Akamai in place enables us to provide valuable information to our consumer quickly and reliably, without worrying about whether our infrastructure could scale to cope with the increasing user demands."

Peak 10 Selected by Volunteers of America. Managed Service provider Peak 10 Inc. announced that it was selected by Volunteers of America of Florida to protect mission-critical data.  The national, non-profit group will use the Peak 10 Tampa campus as a disaster recovery secondary site.  Kathryn Spearman, president and CEO for the group said “while we can take the necessary precautions to protect our mission-critical data in-house, it is never truly protected unless it is replicated and overseen by a trusted partner like Peak 10. We can now focus on our top priority, which is serving our Florida communities.”  Peak 10 recently announced an expansion of its credit facility from $60 million ot $95 million.

Raritan Digital KVM Switch Adds Embedded Encryption. Raritan announced the first digital KVM switch with an embedded Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 certified encryption module.  Meeting both U.S. and Canadian mandates for cryptographic-based security systems the KVM switch will encrypt session traffic consisting of video, keyboard, mouse, virtual media and smart card data.  The FIPS 140-2 module will be embedded in the Raritan Dominion KX II switch.  The Dominion KX II switch offers 256 bit and 128 bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) of keyboard, video, mouse and virtual media data, strong password support, password aging, per-port authorization and built-in authentication capabilities.