Skip to main content

Is Virtualization the heir to the disruptor's throne?

Economic times wonders:

Two decades later Microsoft may have made a similarly seminal mistake. In 2002 it balked at paying a high asking price for VMware, then also an unknown start-up. VMware was later acquired by EMC, a big data-storage supplier, but the Silicon Valley firm remained largely independent. This allowed it to develop software that may yet emerge as a dominant platform in its own right—not for single computers, but for the vast warehouses full of machines, known as data centres, where much computing will be done in future.

VMware's claim to fame is a technology called virtualisation, originally developed for big computers such as mainframes. It allows computers to split themselves into several “virtual machines”, each of which can run its own operating system and applications, in effect separating software from hardware. To do this, VMware developed a small program called a hypervisor, which controls how access to a computer's processors and memory is shared.

Before VMware came along, virtualisation had lingered in obscurity. Rather than splitting up big machines, firms found it easier to use small ones for each new application. For a while, this was a rational strategy. Servers were cheap. Machines that ran more than one application were more likely to crash. Yet the approach led to “server sprawl”, turning data centres into complex warrens of understretched hardware that required ever more people, space and power to keep them going. So it is hardly surprising that virtualisation, which allows multiple servers to be consolidated into a single machine, is one of the fastest growing areas in the software industry (see chart). As the software industry matures and consolidates—this week Oracle said it would buy BEA Systems, and Sun said it would buy MySQL—the emphasis has shifted away from fancy new technology and towards tools that cut costs and allow firms to do more with less.



Goldman Sachs paints the Moore path for VMware:



Read the rest...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Virtualization: GlassHouse hopes to cash in with its IPO!

GlassHouse Technologies Inc. on Tuesday registered to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering that, despite the company's financial losses, could prove a hit with investors drawn to its focus on "virtualization" technology. The Framingham, Mass., company offers consulting services for companies that use virtualization software to improve the performance of corporate servers and cut costs in their data centers. GlassHouse also provides Internet-based data storage. "Software-as-a-service," or SaaS, companies and vendors of virtualization products have proved popular among investors in recent years as corporate customers seek alternatives to conventional packaged software. GlassHouse, with roots in both sectors, will test the strength of that interest, said Peter Falvey, managing director with Boston investment bank Revolution Partners. "It will be a bit of a bell weather," he says. "It's not as though it's the 15th SaaS m...
Post a Comment
Read more