Roundup: IBM, VMware, Nimsoft

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

IBM Turns 100. On Thursday IBM marked the 100th anniversary of its founding on June 16, 1911. To celebrate the milestone, the company is releasing a book, "Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company," debuted a new film, "Wild Ducks," and rang the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange.  IBM will embark on a year-long initiative celebrating its centennial to engage with business leaders, academia, clients and local communities in the 170 countries in which they do business.  Besides the book and movie IBM will expand community service grants by 140 percent over the previous year, hold forums to spur conversations about future advances in science and technology, partner with universities around the wold for IBM Lecture Series, and in September they will present THINK: A Forum on the Future of Leadership.  Additional information about the centennial can be found on www.ibm100.com.   Answer: June 16, 1911 to June 16, 2011.  Question: What is 36,525 days?

VMware introduces vFabric 5. VMware (VMW) announced VMware vFabric 5, an integrated application platform for virtual and cloud environments. vFabric 5 combines application services with the Spring development framework to provide the core application platform for building, deploying and running modern applications. New in this edition is a licensing model that allows enterprises to purchase application infrastructure software based on virtual machines, rather than physical hardware CPUs, and to pay only for the licenses in use. "Cloud computing is reshaping not just how IT resources are consumed by the business, but how those resources are purchased, licensed and delivered," said Tod Nielsen, President, Application Platform, VMware. "While application infrastructure technologies have advanced to meet the needs of today's enterprise, to date, the business models have remained rigid and out of date. With the introduction of VMware vFabric 5, VMware will inextricably link the cost of application infrastructure software to volume utilized by the organization and the value delivered back to the business, helping all organizations advance further toward a cloud environment." VMware vFabric 5 will be generally available in late summer 2011.  It will be offered in two versions:  VMware vFabric Standard at $1,200 per VM and VMware vFabric Advanced at $1,800 per VM.

Nimsoft expands NetApp support. Nimsoft announced enhanced monitoring capabilities for NetApp resources, enabling enterprises and service providers to optimize the performance and availability of their critical data center assets while driving down operational costs and maximizing service levels. Nimsoft Monitor for NetApp provides administrators with comprehensive and detailed performance metrics to track and improve performance, including detailed monitoring of file systems, data movers, storage devices, physical enclosures, and network connections. “B2net has more than 1.5PB of mission critical client data under management,” said Jason Clark, Managing Director at B2net, a NetApp Reseller and Partner of the year. “The scale of this environment and the number of vital business services that rely on our NetApp platforms meant we needed a monitoring platform that could give us a single unified view for managing the performance of our clients highly complex and performance-intensive computing infrastructure."