Comments
rlebherz wrote: Alf, Interesting article. I think the Cloud services and cloud infrastructure lines are a bit blurred, but I agree with most of what you are saying. Dont underestimate the SLA's role in accountability. For companies that have dynamic requirements and no down time can be afforded, make sure you have very tight SLAs. For example, OpSource provides a 100% SLA in the cloud and 100%SLA around production application environments. Now 100% is ideally perfect, it comes down to accountability, yo...
Cloud Expo on Google News

SYS-CON.TV

2009 East
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
IBM
Smarter Business Solutions Through Dynamic Infrastructure
IBM
Smarter Insights: How the CIO Becomes a Hero Again
Microsoft
Windows Azure
GOLD SPONSORS:
Appsense
Why VDI?
CA
Maximizing the Business Value of Virtualization in Enterprise and Cloud Computing Environments
ExactTarget
Messaging in the Cloud - Email, SMS and Voice
Freedom OSS
Stairway to the Cloud
Sun
Sun's Incubation Platform: Helping Startups Serve the Enterprise
POWER PANELS:
Click For 2008 West
Event Webcasts
Parallels Makes It Harder To Tell a Windows from a Mac App
Unlike Apple, which forces people to reboot between operating systems, users can switch between Mac and PC seamlessly

Virtualization Magazine

Without any broad beta testing to give its plans away, Parallels, the desktop virtualization pioneer, released its Windows 7-supporting Parallels Desktop 5 kit on Wednesday.

It claims the widgetry, which lets Mac users run Windows and Linux alongside Mac OS X, is faster, smarter, easier and more powerful than previous generations.

Unlike Apple’s own Boot Camp, which forces people to reboot between operating systems, Parallels users can switch between Mac and Windows seamlessly because of virtualization.

They can now run Windows and Mac side-by-side in Windows Mode, have Windows completely cover the Mac user interface in Full Screen mode, or plum disappear Windows into the Mac interface in Parallels’ new Crystal Mode.

Using Windows apps is of course the only point of the exercise.

There are some 70 new features in the emulation utility and this time through the clever boys in the backroom have made it possible for Windows apps to pinch, swipe and rotate as Mac apps do by borrowing Apple’s Trackpad Gestures technology.

The Crimson Consulting Group clocked Desktop 5’s performance as 22% faster than VMware’s Fusion 3 running 64-bit Windows 7 on a MacBook Pro.

It’s also supposed to be up to 300% faster for virtual machine operations than Parallels’ previous version and benchmarked seven times better on 3D and graphics performance.

The company’s got this newfangled Compressor technology that automatically optimizes virtual machine size for best performance. It can support for eight virtual CPUs and KVM paravirtualization for Linux guests and has tapped into Intel’s VT-x2 widgetry for performance.

It supports Aero and promises copy & paste fidelity for formatted text and complete layouts including images, even between Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

It supports multiple monitors. And Parallels says PCs (including Windows 7) and third-party virtual machines can be easily moves to the Mac with its enhanced Transporter.

Parallels claims around two million users, which puts it ahead of VMware. CEO Serguei Beloussov thinks that may be 10% of the installed base of Apple machines but he’s mot sure.

The widgetry’s out initially in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish with Chinese, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish and Russian coming. It’s priced at $79.99 and comes with third-party security and backup.

About Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.

Register | Sign-in

Reader Feedback: Page 1 of 1

Latest Cloud Developer Stories
This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting partie...
In the interest of selling more widgetry to more people, IBM has transformed one of its mainframes into what it calls Blue Insight, a private cloud packed initially with a petabyte of structured and unstructured data that 200,000 of its sales, product development and manufacturin...
Joyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It’s supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than in...
Salesforce.com is going the way of Facebook and Twitter with a reportedly secure private social networking application called Chatter that companies are supposed to use internally so their people can “collaborate” in real-time, but potentially the techzoid equivalent of the old-f...
RightScale, the cloud manager, plans to support Windows Azure and let customers deploy RightScale-managed applications and take advantage of Azure’s particular properties. It said it would support Azure infrastructure-level services through its new Service Management API like it ...
Subscribe to the World's Most Powerful Newsletters
Subscribe to Our Rss Feeds & Get Your SYS-CON News Live!
Click to Add our RSS Feeds to the Service of Your Choice:
Google Reader or Homepage Add to My Yahoo! Subscribe with Bloglines Subscribe in NewsGator Online
myFeedster Add to My AOL Subscribe in Rojo Add 'Hugg' to Newsburst from CNET News.com Kinja Digest View Additional SYS-CON Feeds
Publish Your Article! Please send it to editorial(at)sys-con.com!

Advertise on this site! Contact advertising(at)sys-con.com! 201 802-3021

SYS-CON Featured Whitepapers
ADS BY GOOGLE

Breaking Cloud Computing News