Virtual Iron, a VMware competitor at the low end, has raised at least $31.5 million from a group that includes Goldman Sachs, SAP Ventures, Intel Capital, Matrix Partners, and Highland Capital.
virtualiron.com
Second mover advantage in server virtualisation
by Stephen Ballantyne
Sometimes coming late to the party can be a good thing. Server virtualisation (running multiple instances of operating systems simultaneously on a single processor) is one example - VMware, a subsidiary of EMC, has led the virtualisation market for the eight years of its existence.
But this has involved significant work; although virtualisation has been around for years in the mainframe world, VMware had to write its own code to make it work for x86 CPUs, a significant effort that also entailed faith in the eventual rise of Intel's desktop CPUs to a position of strength in the server world.
VMware's efforts have been so successful that the chip makers themselves eventually acknowledged the value of the technology.
A couple of years ago Intel announced it would be throwing Intel VT hardware support for virtualisation into most of its subsequent CPUs - I say "throwing it in," because once the necessary chip design features have been created it appears to take very little effort to include them in subsequent CPU designs.
AMD followed suit with its AMD-V CPUs, so the two leading makers of PC CPUs have committed themselves to virtualisation.
Bad news for VMware, but good news for Virtual Iron. What had been difficult and expensive to develop suddenly became relatively easy.
VMware was the result of considerable toil from software engineers originally from Stamford University in Silicon Valley; Virtual Iron is the result of much less work from some smart guys on the other side of the US, at the University of Cambridge in Massachusetts.
Almost as soon as Intel VT was announced they had their company set up, shrewdly taking advantage of the new accessibility of the technology. Not that virtualisation software is simple enough for teenage hackers to knock something together in a weekend - but it's certainly a lot easier to develop than it used to be.
Cheaper, too; Stephen Madden, one of Virtual Iron's systems engineers, was in New Zealand last week to demonstrate the technology in a series of road shows, and to finalise distribution arrangements with MPA Distribution.
"We're selling this through the channel, worldwide," he said. "We're the first serious competition to the established proprietary offering, and we're very satisfied that MPA has the necessary skills and understanding of virtualisation within the datacentre. It's a very good fit for us."
VMware's inherently more complex product has entailed a higher level of commitment on the part of both VMware and its customers - Virtual Iron's product is, by comparison, not far removed from an off-the-shelf commodity, with a more down-to-earth approach.
Part of that is a result of utilising an open-source hypervisor, the part of the software that manages the virtual machines themselves.
Virtual Iron's Xen hypervisor has enjoyed popularity among Linux geeks looking for ways to run Windows at the same time as their preferred operating system, but its geek-ish associations don't mean that it's any less capable as a result.
It does mean, though, that it's much more accessible. Not the least attractive feature of Virtual Iron's offerings can be found on its stylish, cleanly-designed website: a freely-downloadable single server version, so anyone who wants to play around with virtualisation who has a spare modern PC - one with an Intel VT or AMD-V CPU - lying around can set up as many as a dozen virtual servers and see whether the concept works for their business or application, a deal that has obvious attractions for small businesses and independent software developers.
A quick check of Trade Me reveals that there are suitable rack-mount servers available for $1000-2000, for the experimentally inclined (watch out for really cheap servers, though; the appearance of hardware virtualisation and software like Virtual Iron's may account for the sharp drop in value of used pre-Intel VT and AMD-V servers.)
The model that appeals to MPA, which also distributes Wyse Terminals in New Zealand, is to set up customers with lightweight terminals on desks driven from a single powerful server or group of servers in a room somewhere out the back.
It may not be obvious to users, but most modern PCs are wildly overpowered for the routine work they do; even Microsoft's huge Office suite hardly taxes the CPU resources of modern PCs, although it may strain the RAM of many desktop machines.
Many thin clients hung off a few powerful servers is a model that makes a lot of economic sense.
It also allows for more carefully tweaked use of resources, with users who don't make great demands on the system allocated less processor time - in effect, a less powerful virtual machine - than other more needy users.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the main differences between Virtual Iron's free single server download and its "Enterprise Edition," multiple server commercial products are centred on management of resources, including migration, data recovery and maintenance tools.
Just because Virtual Iron has been able to capitalise on hardware and open source software windfalls doesn't mean the company hasn't been busy.
Instead its development efforts have gone to refining the way users can run vrtualisation. The usefulness of virtualisation itself, and its implementation, can be taken for granted.
3-Jul-2007
nbr.co.nz |
