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Hitachi finally brings out Virtage, embeds it in Xeon blades

Hitachi will continue carving out its own place in the virtualization market with a Xeon-based blade server that includes a built-in hypervisor.

In the first quarter of next year, Hitachi America – a subsidiary of the big guy – will ship a Xeon version of the BladeSymphony 1000 system outfitted with homegrown Virtage technology. Virtage stands as Hitachi's firmware-based hypervisor that has been available with the Itanium-based version of BladeSymphony since last November. The pre-loaded hypervisor gives Hitachi a unique attack in the server game with the company claiming performance and security leads over rivals with the technology.
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Built-in hypervisors have suddenly become all the rage. VMware and XenSource have revealed plans to work with OEMs on embedded hypervisors that pop into the flash memory of servers. Hitachi, however, thinks it's creating a much tighter bond between hardware and the hypervisor with its Virtage approach.

"All they are doing with the embedded hypervisor is allowing customers to boot from flash memory," said Steve Campbell, a VP at Hitachi.

With Virtage, Hitachi loads its own hypervisor into the firmware of the service processor found on its blade server chassis. This lets Hitachi's software span all of the blades slotted into the chassis. In addition, it gives Hitachi a chance to reach deep into the server components, controlling things such as physical I/O interfaces.


Ashlee reporting...

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