Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2. In addition to providing the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, the 2.2 release provides new scalability capabilities, migration tools and features to expand the performance and security of the solution.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), a Linux certification organization, announced that it delivered over 258,000 exams and 85,000 certifications worldwide. LPI's industry standard certifications are delivered in thousands of locations worldwide and in multiple languages, with the support of employers, vendors, and trainers.

Red Hat last week released the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The first beta was released in April, and incorporated a range of new and upgraded features. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 beta 2 provides an updated installer, additional new technologies and resolutions to many of the issues that were reported in the initial beta. Red Hat is asking customers and partners who are testing the initial beta to install and continue their testing with beta 2.

Sybase has announced the availability of its SQL Anywhere 12 database and synchronization solution. A core component of the Sybase Mobility Platform, SQL Anywhere is optimized for mission-critical database applications running outside traditional data center environments requiring little or no onsite IT support. According to Chris Kleisath, senior director of engineering, SQL Anywhere 12 represents a major platform release, providing many key new enhancements for performance and scalability such as support for storage and synchronization of spatial data, support for iPhone devices, and new self-management features.

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IBM and DePaul University unveiled a new Center for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics that gives students expertise in predictive analytics, a skill increasingly in demand by employers around the globe.

Rocket Software, a developer of enterprise modernization and SOA integration products, announced support for IBM Rational Open Access: RPG Edition for the IBM i platform. Rational's RPG Edition decouples application business logic from the 5250 screen layer and enables RPG developers to create new, non-screen-based access to RPG application functions.

EnterpriseDB, a supplier of PostgreSQL-based solutions, and Netezza Corporation, a provider of data warehouse and analytic appliances, announced a new partnership intended to ease database migration projects. Under the agreement, Netezza will resell EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, which includes its Oracle Compatibility Layer, as Netezza Migrator. Migrator will be compatible with the Netezza TwinFin appliance.

Sepaton, a provider of disk-based data protection solutions, announced it is shipping a new solution that provides for the guaranteed, auditable erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges. Sepaton's Secure Erasure, a licensed option for Sepaton's S2100-ES2 data protection systems, enables storage administrators to schedule all or selected cartridges for a total data overwrite with the clearing or purging of low, medium and high sensitivity data.

dynaTrace software, a provider of application performance management (APM) software, has extended its Continuous APM system to business transaction management (BTM), enabling companies to manage every transaction from a business context from a single system, while also providing IT with actionable data.

NEON Enterprise Software released its latest version of NEON zPrime, a software product that enables organizations to safely and legally offload work from IBM System z mainframes to low-cost IBM specialty processors (SPs), and potentially carve millions of dollars from IT budgets.

Syncsort, a provider of data management software, announced a new set of solutions intended to help organizations accelerate mainframe application modernization initiatives while consuming fewer resources and reducing costs. At the core of the solution set is DMExpress, designed to deliver what Syncsort calls "extreme performance translation" of large amounts of mainframe data to open systems platforms, as well as transformation capabilities on the open systems platforms.

Red Hat has announced a set of solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds. The first series in its Red Hat Cloud Foundations line, dubbed Cloud Foundations: Edition One, targets private cloud efforts. Edition One bundles Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid. The solution also includes a "cookbook" implementation guide for cloud setup, as well as a detailed reference architecture providing step-by-step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring private clouds. Red Hat is also providing consulting services and training to enable turnkey assessment, implementation and operational management of private clouds. Cloud Foundations: Edition One is "everything that a customer needs to successfully plan, deploy and manage a private cloud and it is the first in a family of Cloud Foundations that Red Hat will expand along with its partners to provide a complete set of cloud services." said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit, at a press conference during last week's Red Hat Summit in Boston.

New Aberdeen reports on best practices for decreasing cost and improving processing power on the mainframe are available now.

Are you currently evaluating the business benefits of running virtualization in a distributed versus mainframe environment?

This webcast hosted by Novell and IBM discusses the highly scalable, superior IT optimization and workload consolidation that System z delivers to a virtualized environment.

At the recent Novell BrainShare EMEA event in Amsterdam, for which IBM was a sponsor, Jay Ennesser, vice president, Global Alliance Solutions, IBM, was interviewed about the emerging role of Linux in the cloud, and the strong IBM and Novell partnership which spans more than 10 years. Commenting on the role of Linux in the cloud, Ennesser noted it is already in utilities, water management systems, in how the infrastructure of people's homes is managed, and in cars. It is in everything people do every day and becoming more and more mainstream. "Cloud is just another natural extension of what has already gone on with Linux today. We will just provide you another opportunity from a cost of ownership point of view to deploy the services that are being deployed."

Openness was the theme of the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 earlier this month in Brussels. Speakers included Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president for the Digital Agenda, and Dr. Michael Karasick, vice president of technical and business strategy, IBM Software Group, as well as Don Deutsch, vice president, Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle, Prof. Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt of University of Southampton.

VMware and Novell have expanded their strategic partnership with an original equipment manufacturer agreement through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware also intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Openness was the theme of the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 earlier this month in Brussels. Speakers included Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president for the Digital Agenda, and Dr. Michael Karasick, vice president of technical and business strategy, IBM Software Group, as well as Don Deutsch, vice president, Standards Strategy and Architecture, Oracle, Prof. Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt of University of Southampton.

VMware and Novell have expanded their strategic partnership with an original equipment manufacturer agreement through which VMware will distribute and support the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Under the agreement, VMware also intends to standardize its virtual appliance-based product offerings on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Sybase has announced the availability of Sybase Advantage Server 10, the latest version of its client/server database with both ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) table-based and SQL-based data access.

Confio Software which offers Ignite 8 performance analysis software, has unveiled IgniteFree, which the company describes as the only free response-time database performance analysis tool. IgniteFree is carved from Ignite 8's primary feature set and gives DBAs a point-in-time view of bottlenecks in their database. IgniteFree for Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2/LUW can be downloaded from Confio at no cost. "We have taken the core feature of Ignite - which is the response time monitoring - and we have packaged it in a free version so that you get all the response time information for real time monitoring for the past hour at no cost," Don Bergal, chief operating officer of Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

At the Innovate 2010 conference, IBM announced new software and services, based on its Rational line of software development tools, intended to help deliver a new "systems of systems" approach for integrating products and services. "The value, lifecycle and ecosystem of any smart product today are driven by software," says Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM Rational general manager. "In order to build an enduring and innovative competency in software delivery, it must be managed as an agile and cost-effective business process within a framework that allows continuous improvements and accommodates change."

SOA Software, a SOA and cloud services governance provider, announced Service Manager product version 6.0, designed to provide advanced virtualization, management, security, monitoring and mediation capabilities for SOA and cloud services, implemented using an OSGi-based architecture. "Private internal and private external cloud implementations probably make up the majority of what we are seeing in enterprises today," Alistair Farquharson, CTO for SOA Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "They definitely add another layer of governance automation to the mix - not only are you governing how applications should be built but where and how they are run. Enterprises are trying to save costs by automating as much of this infrastructure as possible and this creates risk without governance."

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, introduced a new version of its server virtualization for aggregation software platform, designed to help companies handle larger workloads, larger applications and support more and more building block component servers.

Nasuni, a gateway to cloud storage, has partnered with Rackspace Hosting to offer customers a scalable online storage solution that leverages the power of the cloud. Rackspace customers will now be able to use cloud-based files for their primary storage needs, as Nasuni extends the use of the service's backup and file archiving. The combination of Rackspace and Nasuni simplifies file storage by eliminating the intricacies of backup or needing to manage multiple storage tiers.

iTKO, a provider of virtualization and validation solutions for enterprise cloud applications, announced integration of its LISA software with the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, based on the IBM Jazz platform. The combined products are intended to help to ease the challenges of developing and testing modern applications, including cloud-based services, integration platforms such as IBM WebSphere/MQ, DataPower and many more enabling technologies.

Veryant, a COBOL and Java technology integration tool vendor, announced its isCOBOL Application Platform Suite (APS) 2010 Release 1 is "Compatible with Windows 7," having met all of Microsoft Corp.'s technical requirements for compatibility and reliability.