News

Microsoft Heading Forward With Container-Based Data Centers

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Not entirely related to virtualization as such, but hugely relevant as far we’re concerned: Microsoft is getting serious about embracing containers as the key to building scalable, energy-efficient cloud computing platforms. The company’s bold move is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators. Microsoft’s new Chicago facility is part of the company’s fleet of next-generation data centers being built to support its Live suite of “software plus services” online applications.

DataCenterKnowledge quotes Microsoft Director of Data Center Services Michael Manos:

“The entire first floor of Chicago is going to be containers. This represents our first container data center. The containers are going to be dropped off and plugged into network cabling and power.” The second floor of the immense facility will be a traditional raised-floor data center, Manos said. “It’s a bold step forward. We’re trying to address scale with the cloud level services. We were trying to figure the best way to bring capacity online quickly.”

Manos added that the facility will accommodate between 150 and 220 shipping containers, which will be shipped and dropped off by trucks. That approach led Microsoft to consult with parking lot operators to address the design logistics of enabling large trucks to navigate within the facility.

In 2006, Sun Microsystems introduced Project Blackbox (now the Sun MD S20), the first effort at a “data center in a box” incorporating a high-density computing environment into a 20-foot shipping container. The containers can travel on trains, ships or trucks.

We were thinking about adding a joke about containers containing containers (you know, the software ones), but it’s getting late and we’ve had quite a busy, interesting day already.

Sun Microsystems To Acquire Parallels For $ 205 Million (Updated)

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters 23 Comments

Looks like that Parallels IPO won’t be happening after all. Sun Microsystems has today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Parallels (formerly SWsoft) and all of its assets for a whopping $ 205 million. The major acquisition had been rumoured to be imminent throughout the course of 2007, but never actually went through, which led mosts analysts to believe the Herndon, VA-based company was heading towards an IPO following in VMware’s footsteps rather than being picked up by one of the big boys.

Needless to say, the acquisition is a pretty bold one, which is bound to serve as wake-up call for the entire virtualization industry. Both companies had been on a buying spree the past few months: Sun picked up innotek / VirtualBox, while Parallels recently acknowledged its January acquisition of ModernGigabyte. The acquisition is expected to be finalized by June, around the time Sun also plans to ship xVM Server.

“With the acquisition of Parallels, Sun’s ready to become the only true leader in virtualization technology,” said Brian Sutphin, Executive Vice President Corporate Development & Alliances for Sun Microsystems. “With Parallels’ strong desktop position, we will be able to cater both Windows/Linux and Mac users with our state-of-the-art virtualization offering.”

Sergei Beloussov, Board Chairman and CEO of Parallels, added:”We’re extremely excited about the opportunities this merger will bring for our many customers and partners. We’re looking forward to effectively integrating our server product line with Sun’s sparc systems.”

Parallels, former SWsoft, has been making waves ever since it was founded in 1999. The virtualization technology company today counts more than 900 employees worldwide and has more than doubled revenues every year for the past eight years, while its products have been giving VMware a run for its money, especially in the small- and medium-business marketplace. The company was backed in 2005 by Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Insight Venture Partners.

While VMware has been more than struggling to consolidate its splashing entry on the public market, Parallels has effectively become the second largest virtualization seller, with both containers and hypervisor plays in its portfolio. Sun’s bold move is logical in this regard, be it quite late, as this acquisition would have made more sense if it had happened around this time last year.

We’re still scrambling to get some official comments on the news from market insiders, we’ll update this post as they come in!

Update: obviously, this was an April Fool (we’re in based in Europe, so it’s April 1 earlier than over in the US).

On any other day, what would you think about this announcement? Would it have surprised you that much? Do you think it would be a fair valuation and a good synergy? Let us know in comments!

(also: check some classic April Fools’ Day jokes here)

Update 2: kudos to Parallels for their sense of humour, thanks to Brian, Dan and Tarry for linking and to the person who dugg the story 😉

Update 3: check out our follow-up post

Research: Virtualization Is Big in Asia Pacific, To Hit $ 1.35 Billion By 2010

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The virtualization software and services market in Asia Pacific is estimated to reach $ 1.35 billion with CAGR of 42 % by 2010, according to IT market research firm Springboard Research.

Virtualization services is estimated to touch $ 1 billion by 2010 and will form the major portion of this market as organizations will spend two to three times more on services than on software. According to the research, 50 % of CIOs want to deploy virtualization solutions over the next 18-24 months to address issues like low system capacity utilization, poor performance and other challenges associated with managing growing IT infrastructure.

The report is based on a survey of CIOs from large and mid-sized enterprises in Australia, China, India and Singapore.

“Our research indicates that virtualization, at least at the server level, is becoming an imperative and that a growing number of companies will implement virtualization at the server level in 2008,” said Michael Barnes, vice president – Software Research at Springboard Research.

“The complex nature of engagements with vendors and SIs while implementing virtualization solutions is a prime reason for virtualization services taking a larger share of the market,” he added.

On the software side, VMWare is the Asia Pacific virtualization market leader with an estimated 70 % market share, while Microsoft, Parallels, Virtual Iron and XenSource are other players with significant presence.

IBM, HP, Dell and Sun dominate the virtualization services market. Australia and Korea lead the virtualization marketplace in APAC due to their well-built infrastructure, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and India are high growth potential markets.

[Source: CIOL]

Fujitsu Siemens Merges With Former Siemens IT Services Company

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Fujitsu Siemens, which manufactures hardware from laptop PCs to servers, will this week merge with a former Siemens IT services company to enable the company to battle head on with players like IBM, Dell and HP. Two years ago, Fujitsu Siemens had already acquired a former Siemens engineering division called Siemens IT Products Services.

To this date, the division has been trading as a separate company from Fujitsu Siemens but from 1 April the two entities will merge.

[Source: SiliconRepublic]

3Leaf Systems Obtains Intel License For CPU Virtualization

March 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

3Leaf Systems today announced it has obtained a license for Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect, which will allow it to build virtualization support for Intel servers. Previously, the company only had a HyperTransport license and only supported AMD servers.

3Leaf uses a direct communication network between server CPUs so data does not have to go over an Ethernet or Fibre Channel connection. The company fabricates special virtualization processors for the motherboard to virtualize the CPUs, memory and I/O of the entire datacenter.

The 3Leaf technology breaks down the physical walls of x86 servers and makes their resources available, as needed, across the datacenter. One of the problems in data centers is one group of servers dedicated to a task might be running at 5 % utilization, while another group is maxed out and needs more CPU cycles and more memory.

“We are enabling the next generation of the datacenter, which are going to be dynamic data centers, where resources, compute, memory or I/O could be made available to the applications on an on demand basis rather than in a static way the way it exists today,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, president and CEO of 3Leaf.

“At the end of the day we’re almost reinventing the mainframe here,” said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization marketplaces. “I spoke to someone at American Express who said ‘VMware is great but I can’t scale outside the box.’ I think we’re going to see that, where flexibility will require the ability to virtualize outside of the sheet metal.”

The solution is an unusual one: a chip to handle the load balancing that goes into the processor socket. So instead of an Opteron or Xeon on the motherboard socket, a 3Leaf processor goes in its place. A PCI Express card isn’t an option, as the bus is not fast enough.

The AMD-based 3Leaf processor is planned for the first half of 2009 while the Intel one is planned for the first half of 2010.

[Source: InternetNews]

Xsigo Partners With Computacenter To Deliver I/O Virtualization To Europe

March 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

San Jose-based Xsigo announced that it has formally partnered with European IT services and solutions provider Computacenter. The partnership, which was announced about a month ago, encompasses technical, marketing and professional services relationships and confirms Xsigo as an integral component of Computacenter’s virtualization offering.

Computacenter claims to have chosen to partner with Xsigo due to its differentiated I/O virtualization product family (watch a short interview and live demo from their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth). Computacenter is a European provider of VMware server virtualization solutions, and is headquartered in Hatfield, UK.

“Virtualization offers organizations new opportunities to increase the efficiency and agility of their IT operations, but it can also place different demands on their data center infrastructure,” said Terry Walby, director of data center solutions at Computacenter. “We are continually looking for innovation and enhancement in the technology optimization solutions we deliver to our customers. By adding Xsigo virtual I/O products to our comprehensive portfolio of virtualization solutions, we can help customers further simplify and accelerate their transformation journey towards an optimized data center equipped to cope with the demands of the future.”

Xsigo sought to extend its I/O virtualization outside the US by developing a partnership in Europe which matched its vision for virtualization and simplification of the data center. Xsigo claims its I/O virtualization solutions allow large data centers to lower their server-related operational expenses by up to 80 %, cut capital costs by 50 %, and use 70 % less cabling.

“Computacenter’s services and solutions deliver the breadth and technical expertise to help customers optimize their operations, and Xsigo is the virtual I/O part of that equation,” stated Charlie Will, vice president of international sales at Xsigo. “Computacenter selects best-in-class products, such as VMware and Xsigo, and enriches these offerings with its own expertise in sales, support, and professional services. Computacenter puts it all together so that customers can rapidly deploy tightly integrated virtualization solutions that effectively address their business requirements.”

[Source: SYS-CON]