New Products

From the “ounce of prevention” department comes Opengear's EMD 5000, a new environmental management solution for continuous monitoring of environmental conditions at the rack level. The EMD 5000 protects critical data-center assets from hazards, such as heat, humidity, smoke, water leaks, cabinet intrusion and other environmental conditions, by providing facilities managers with extensive logging and alert facilities. Users can view ambient temperature and humidity of the remote environment and set the device to send progressive alarms automatically from warning levels to critical alerts. The EMD also monitors the status of two external dry contacts that can be connected to a smoke detector, water detector, vibration or open-door sensor.

www.opengear.com

The trio of IBM, Virtual Bridges and Canonical have joined forces to offer a Linux-based virtual PC solution that the firms claim halves the costs of licensing and maintaining a desktop. The solution hosts multiple virtual Linux desktops on a server, replacing Microsoft Windows with Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Office with open-standards-based alternatives, such as IBM Lotus Symphony. The virtual desktop, called Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), is provided by Virtual Bridges. IBM cites reduced TOC related to licensing, hardware upgrades, power consumption and support requirements. The solution is a key component in IBM's offerings for entities in financial services and in the public sector.

www.ibm.com/linux, www.canonical.com, www.vbridges.com