Sun announced the acquisition of the producer of software for cloud computing - Q-layer, a Belgium based company. Q-layer has been founded to provide a virtual data center for cloud computing services offered by data centеr service providers.

The company's solution is to abstract the hardware, storage and network facilities of a physical data centers would into a Database Abstraction Layer (DAL). DAL also features a language to instantiate and operate a virtual private data center (VPDC) in a cloud. Q-layer's NephOS software operates through existing virtualization hypervisor technologies like those Microsoft, Sun, VMware and Xen provide.

Users can provision their own virtual data centres through a web interface, specifying virtualised server, storage, network bandwidth and application components. The company's technology enables data centers to provide scalable services and reorganize and customize the solution they offer quickly and simply.

Q-layer is another step to help Sun to strengthen its virtual data center solutions for cloud computing and to better compete VMware. Sun also aims to provide its customers with a cloud computing and web hosting solution that will help them to compete with the cloud data center services provided by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

If you don't know that name parallels, then you are not in web hosting or just missed a very important part of it. Parallels is a very popular software company, the producer of the Virtuozzo - the world's leading virtualization technology. Parallels will host one of the most important events in the virtualization world of 2009 - "Parallels Summit 2009".

The focus of the meeting!

Parallels Summit 2009 will focus on Cloud Computing and will include sessions on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Automation and the development of virtualization technologies. The key objectives of the summit is to gain insight on upcoming virtualization market trends, and to help the companies that use Parallels technologies to learn more about strategies on building a successful web enterprises.

The welcome keynote of the Parallels summit - "The Next Generation of Optimized Computing" - will be holded from Sergey Belusov, the Parallels CEO. It will be followed by a speech of Morris Miller, the founder of probably the worlds top enterprise hosting provider - Rackspace. Top executives from IBM and Intel will also speak in front of the Parallels partners.

Antonio Piraino from Tier 1 will talk about cloud computing business models. The first day of the meeting ends with a Parallels virtualization roadmap update.

On the second day Senior sales Engineers from Parallels will speak about Parallels virtualization containers best practices, which means "high availability and clustering".

Plesk 9.0

The new version of Plesk Panel, one of the most popular web hosting management software - Plesk 9.0 - and its SMB roadmap and update will be also presented during the second day of the summit.

SEO

Guillaume Bouchard of NVI will hold one of the two final sessions of the summit. It will be dedicated to search engine optimization and the way companies can build their market share on the competitive web hosting market.

The best news come when most people think that there's nothing new. The VPS Host Dir's editor's team wants to wish you Merry Christmas and to target your attention to a few very interesting articles about virtualization. On of them is a quiz.

"Server virtualization quiz: How much do you know?", this is the name of the quiz, published by Computerworld.

The first question of the quiz is "On a particular server, within each virtual machine:
- You can run any version of Windows without regard of the version, running on the virtual machines

- The versions of Windows must be no more than one release level apart

- The versions of Windows must be exactly the same"

To choose the correct answer, to see other questions and to lear more about virtualization, visit Computerworld's virtualization quiz