Citrix offering free Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V – InfoWorld

Citrix Systems is using the stage at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans to highlight its latest free virtualization offering: Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V Express Edition. The free virtualization tool will help with virtual machine management and works in conjunction with Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor and Windows Server 2008.

VMware Builds Out vCenter Virtualization Management – eWeek

VMware is growing the application management capabilities of vCenter with the introduction of AppSpeed, which will make it easier for IT administrators to manage the applications that are running on VMware virtualization environments.

Blue sky thinking leads to Azure cloud pricing – TG Daily

Microsoft said it will charge between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte for network bandwidth, 12 cents an hour for computing, 15 cents a gigabyte for storage and 10 cents for every 10,000 storage transactions.

Capturing the private cloud – Government Computer News

In March, IT analyst firm McKinsey & Co. released a report arguing that although small and midsize organizations could save money by using public-cloud services, large organizations could save money by keeping their processing needs in-house.

Synology DS409slim: Green, 2.5-Pound, 2TB File Server – Gearlog

Synology says the DS409slim draws just 19 watts, 12 watts when it’s in hibernation mode. The unit employs a 1.2GHz Marvell processor and has 128MB onboard RAM. The back panel has a network connection, a USB jack (another is ont he front panel), an eSATA connector allowing you to attach a fifth drive for more storage or more redundancy, and a 12-volt jack for the external transformer.