Storage supplier EMC sold 10% of its
VMware
virtualisation software business last week, in a move that the
company said would release capital for further development of the
virtualisation platform.
David Goulden, EMC executive vice-president and chief financial
officer, said, "The proceeds from this transaction are expected to
provide VMware with the financial resources it needs to achieve its
full growth potential."
VMware president Diane Greene said, "We expect that the IPO will
help us execute on our vision of an industry standard virtual
infrastructure. It should enable us to continue to invest in great
product development and grow an even stronger partner
ecosystem."
Server virtualisation is regarded as the next big thing in
datacentre computing. John Humphreys, programme director for
enterprise virtualisation at analyst firm IDC, said that, as well
enabling hardware consolidation, a growing number of organisations
were using virtualisation technology for business continuity and
disaster recovery.
With spending on server virtualisation estimated by IDC to
increase to £7.5bn worldwide by 2009, virtualisation software
providers such as EMC, Novell and Microsoft are ramping up product
development.
IDC said virtualisation would continue to be adopted by
enterprises in the next 18 months, becoming more widely available
on desktops and mobile devices. This would allow businesses to
reduce costs and increase security.
Microsoft is expected to update its Virtual Server hypervisor in
the fourth quarter of 2007. Meanwhile, Novell and Intel are
collaborating on an initiative to speed up virtualised Windows
running on the Xen open source virtualisation platform.
Novell has nailed its colours to the open source mast, but last
autumn it signed an agreement with Microsoft to improve they way
the firms' software works together.
Novell is working with Intel to boost the network performance of
the Windows operating system running in Xen-based virtual machines.
In the past, Linux running on Xen achieved better performance than
Windows on Xen, said Novell.
Windows uses the hardware virtualisation features in Intel and
AMD x86 processors in combination with the Xen hypervisor.
Novell is releasing the software in an open pilot project with
Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10. It will then be
released to all users with Service Pack 1 of SLES 10, due to ship
this spring with Xen 3.0.4. Microsoft will provide joint technical
support for users running Windows Server 2003 R3 with Xen and
SLES.
Virtualisation making IT more cost-effective
Teachers save
with VMware project
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