Posts tagged with consolidation

Yin and Yang of Virtualization Maturity

The notion of consolidation is almost synonymous with virtualization. In the x86 world, we have cut our teeth on virtualization that consolidates workloads of underutilized servers.  When x86 virtualization was first taking root, led by pioneers such as VMware and Parallels in 1998/1999 and even Connectix in some respect the late 1980s, we started to see a common phenomena of new markets – lots of innovation and the emergence of startup companies and new technology projects in larger companies. I like to think of this as the Ying phase.

We are now in a more mature phase of virtualization – the Yang phase – with the opposite phenomena of the consolidation of virtualization companies, projects, and technology. Early on Microsoft bought Connectix with Hyper-V being the fruit of this union. Parallels bought Virtuozzo and extended itself to the world of Windows and Linux. And more recently we witnessed Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems and now Virtual Iron.

Oracle has already consolidated some powerful business processing applications under its name and will now add some very critical virtualization technology.  Oracle understands the importance of virtualization as an underlying infrastructure technology for the x86 computing world. Its grid technology, introduced in 2003, leveraged  innovations  like 64-bit and multi-core that AMD was driving into x86 processor architecture and served as a forerunner in scale-out cluster environments that now are taking on the name of cloud computing.

With its purchase of Virtual Iron, Oracle adds another product that is based on the Xen open-source hypervisor technology. While a smaller player in the virtualization market, Virtual Iron has always had a good reputation for software that delivers dynamic resource management and automation. This includes providing some necessary features for making virtualization a mainstream technology, such as capacity management, power management, and the ability to integrate with other software through an open, comprehensive, and scriptable API. Coupled with Oracle’s and Sun’s current Xen-based virtualization projects, this provides a very nice framework for some serious virtualization technology. Another interesting aspect of Virtual Iron, it brings a software that has been more geared to the mid-market in the more enterprise portfolio of Oracle and Sun, a point made by well respected industry analyst, Gordon Haff, in a recent article about the acquisition.

So , we are now living through the consolidation of the vendors who are developing consolidation software. This brings some very interesting symmetry to the market. 

As always we want to promote open discussion about virtualization trends in the community, so please let me know your thoughts – pro and con – on the consolidation of virtualization vendors.

Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

@margaretjlewis