Quest Software, Inc.  publicly detailed its virtualization and cloud strategy at a breakfast event for media and analysts last week at the VMworld conference in San Francisco. Carl Eberling, Quest vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Cloud Management, and Scott Davidson, senior vice president and CFO, presented the strategy before a packed audience of financial and industry analysts and media.

“Quest is known for market leadership, superior products and 100,000 global customers,” Eberling told attendees. “You probably don’t know, however, that Quest is the largest virtualization management ISV, and market leader in data protection and monitoring with more than 20,000 virtualization customers worldwide. Our solutions for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures include data protection, monitoring, administration, desktop virtualization, and cloud automation.”

Quest Software announced a new release of vWorkspace, a single virtualization solution for application delivery and desktop deployments. The new release includes major functionality enhancemenys including EOP Xtreme to speed WAN performance, and integration with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services to automate deployment and administration, and simplify use.

Available now, the new Quest vWorkspace version 7.1 supports multiple centralized desktop platforms, including Microsoft Hyper-V-based virtual desktops, Remote Desktop Session hosts (formely known as Terminal Servers) and physical/blade PCs. vWorkspace securely and efficiently delivers advanced management capabilities including connection brokering, desktop provisioning and user experience optimizations, and provides support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. For more information please visit: http://www.quest.com/vworkspace/new-release.aspx

Accessing, discovering and sharing data is now even easier. The release of Toad for Data Analysts 2.5 makes your job as a data detective even easier with new and enhanced features, including:

• An enhanced query builder - pivots and charts are now built directly into the query builder, enabling you to change queries on the fly without switching screens
• New compare and sync functionality - ODBC support has been added for all database platforms, allowing you to compare and synchronize data between an even greater range of sources
• Enhancements to automation - loops and variables are now supported for more flexibility and more powerful scripts
• FTP support - it's now possible to upload and publish work to an FTP server, for even more options in report distribution.

On May 12th 2009, Quest Software unveiled a complete update of its award-winning solution portfolio for SQL Server at Tec-Ed 2009. Quest Software's industry-leading solutions are built to tackle the challenges faced by SQL Server professionals across all key areas of database management. Paired with free access to SQLServerPedia, the follwing product release provide the community with the mosto comprehensive portfolio of solutions for SQL Server in the market.

For years Quest Software has provided the SQL Market with advanced, high-performance backup compression and encryption via LiteSpeed for SQL Server. Now Quest Software brings the same high-quality, cost-cutting backup and recovery technology to the Oracle platform with LiteSpeed Engine for Oracle.
The strain of today's current market conditions combined with increasingly high-volume, diverse database environments underscores the need for quickly realized cost savings and optimal use of IT resources. LiteSpeed Engine for Oracle offers database administrators (DBAs) and advanced tool that cuts storage costs, reduces backup and restore times and delivers a solid return-on-investment. Oracle DBAs charged with handling secure backup and recovery strategies on a lean budget can realize 70 to 90 percent compression with LiteSpeed while maintaining complete control over the backup and recovery process.

In a recent survey of IT executives and managers, Forrester Research reported that 59% of the respondents had either completed or were actively executing an IT consolidation effort that involved server, storage or whole data center consolidation. 

While reducing costs was named as a primary motivating factor, Quest Software has observed that the lack of guidelines or tools is a major issue. Quest offers a consolidation guide that outlines best practices and provides ways to use Quest tools that enable SQL Server database administrators (DBAs) to easily plan and execute a consolidation project.