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Data center design is undergoing a revolutionary change due to virtualization technologies. Some five years from now it will look very different. For now the players in the market are doing battle to gain your attention. At the moment the king of the hill remains VMware, but how long will it be before the other players begin to have an impact.
Similar battles exist such as that between AMD and Intel. Intel the larger of the two have been doing battle with the smaller AMD taking shots and putting dents in the Intel armor.
Everyone from Microsoft, Citrix and key server manufacturers such as HP, IBM and Dell are in the game.
Recently HP announced technologies that integrate virtualization capabilities into the HP ProLiant server platform, allowing customers to virtualize their server environments.
Called HP ProLiant iVirtualization, the technologies allow businesses of all sizes to lower costs, improve productivity and better allocate resources across their server infrastructures.
iVirtualization is integrated directly into the ProLiant server using features that leverage customers' existing server management tools. As such, when a server is powered on, it is automatically and immediately configured into a fully capable virtualization environment.
In the meantime, Dell is making strides as it announced that it is OEMing PAN, Egenera’s data center virtualization and management software.
Egenera, which has been doing virtualization way longer than most people, claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls “Virtualization 2.0,” the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing.
VMware and its hypervisor are bully at virtualizing one server at a time. PAN, on the other hand, takes VMware – or for that matter Xen or Microsoft’s Hyper-V when it finally gets here – it doesn’t care it’s hypervisor-agnostic – and virtualizes the data center, creating networks of virtual and physical servers.
It can move individual servers, groups of servers or entire systems from one place to another seamlessly and securely with verifiable disaster recovery and uptime.
Besides server farms, this little miracle also virtualizes storage and networking too.
Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera’s BladeFrames, was first to take it up on its offer and signed up for PAN on its industry standard Primergy servers.
Both the Dell and Fujitsu Siemens ports should appear on the market at about the same time before the end of this June.
Yes, the data center is sure to change in the next few years due to virtualization and companies scrambling to be in front of this foot race. There is no question that there is more to come…
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