VMware Announces 300+ Academic Institutions Are Participating in Its Worldwide Academic Program

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- At VMworld 2007, VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced that more than 300 academic institutions are participating in its Academic Program in which its products and resources are available free-of-charge to qualified academic institutions for research and teaching and its source code is made available to qualified academic institutions for research and publication.

As part of the program, VMware plans to release an online Academic Community Center later this year that will feature courseware, research papers, discussion groups and other valuable resources designed to enhance research and instruction in the area of virtualization. Registration will be free and anyone who elects to join the Academic Community Center will be able to download content as well as share their own content with the Community.

"VMware itself grew out of academic research and many of our earliest customers were at universities. The VMware Academic Program is our way of contributing back to academia by making our products available free-of-charge for research and teaching," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, Vice President of Technology Development at VMware. "We have more than 300 academic institutions worldwide taking advantage of the program today, and we look forward to working with them and others to further accelerate research in the area of virtualization."

Participants in the VMware Academic Program include Boston University, Brigham Young, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia University, Cornell, Duke, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton, Purdue, Rochester Institute of Technology, Singapore Polytechnic, Stanford, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tokyo Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Genoa, University of Toronto and University of Waterloo.

"The VMware Academic Program is of particular benefit to both research and teaching of operating systems concepts," said Dr. Richard West, Associate Professor of Computer Science Department at Boston University. "I have used VMware software in my operating systems courses for several years, so that students can safely develop kernel-level policies and mechanisms in a virtual machine environment without disrupting the underlying host operating system. In the same regard, VMware software provides a convenient sandbox for rapidly prototyping novel system ideas as part of our ongoing research."

"At Columbia University, we conduct advanced virtualization research and teach cutting-edge systems courses using virtualization," said Professor Jason Nieh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. "VMware's Academic Program helps make this possible by providing free access to the best commercial virtualization software for our research and teaching endeavors."

"With the VMware Academic Program, I am able to design the best curriculum for my students by accessing the industry-leading virtualization software and also the best set of technical resources on the subject," said Brian Cameron, Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. "Students can use software in our labs and also on their personal computers greatly enhancing their overall learning experience."

"The VMware Academic Program has been very beneficial to us," said David Lie, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto. "The software and source access provided through the program have enabled us to evaluate our research proposals on the most widely deployed, industry-leading virtualization software. The engineers at VMware have been extremely helpful in providing us with technical support for our work."

Academic institutions and K-12 schools are able to purchase VMware products and services for use within their IT infrastructure at a special discount from VMware and VMware resellers.

"If you are using VMware Infrastructure in production, you are two-thirds of the way to a robust disaster recovery plan before you even begin to design it. You get portable servers with flexible hardware requirements and ease of management. The new capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 of Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA), for instance, let you take advantage of resource pools and dynamically move virtual machines as needs change," said Tim Antonowicz, Senior Systems Engineer at Bowdoin College. "Bowdoin has a VMware-first policy for any new system -- not only because of the disaster recovery benefits of VMware virtualization software, but also because of the other cost savings and efficiencies that VMware software enables."

Additional information on the VMware Academic Program can be found at http://www.vmware.com/partners/academic/.

About VMware

VMware is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. Organizations of all sizes use VMware solutions to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California and majority-owned by EMC Corporation . For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/.

VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Contacts: Amber Rowland VMware 650-427-1101 arowland@vmware.com Andrew Schmitt OutCast Communications for VMware 415-392-8282 x706 andrew@outcastpr.com