Stories about: XenSource

Security issues often seem to smolder more than burn, but these six are certainly capable of lighting a fire under IT professionals at a moment's notice. Handle with care.

As enterprises seek out ways to reduce IT costs, optimize resources and improve operational efficiencies, three technology trends have started to dominate: virtualization, service-oriented architecture and mobility. More promising yet is the intertwining of these unique technologies.

Virtualization introduces new potentials for flexibility and change over and beyond anything the world of network security has ever seen. Unfortunately for a host of large security vendors, most of the typical devices being used to protect physical data centers require a certain level of stability (or inflexibility) in order to promise proper protection.

Deployment of products that transform physical servers into "virtual machines" has resulted in nothing short of a data centre revolution. But virtualization of everything from operating systems to applications increasingly has critics asking: Where's the security?

Virtualization is the hot new trend in corporate data centers today. Virtualization servers from Microsoft, VMware and XenSource allow many virtual computers to run on a single (real) computer system. In practice, this means that 20 or 30 physical servers in a machine room can be turned into the same number of virtual machines running on a single physical system with two, four or eight processors.