Ed Walsh, CEO Virtual Iron: "Don't get into the vendor lock"

Funny, I speak to many IT folks in the past and have heard the same news around the IT manager circles. People are scared to get into to complex locks while the road to freedom and the flight to the Clouds is the shining light at the end of the tunnel. The "transitional vehicle" that virtualization is today, should not be a place where you want to get you ass glued too. But actually the decoupling of the app stack from your hardware layer does make it easier to make that move to the "Query 3.0" architecture which the clouds will try to help you with eventually.

The battle to move on from one vehicle to another is pretty much ,rather primordial, the same. Today we are getting people excited because they spent all their time discussing and talking and now they are willing to budge. Same challenges will be there tomorrow...this is also called the fear of Change.

Anyways, I am sure Ed didn't get too conceptual or philosophical with all this, he simply said:

"Storage design decisions are critical. Don't build out separate islands," he advised, in a tacit swipe at VMware. VMware's popular VMotion product can move running virtual machines around, provided they are using a shared storage file format from VMware. Virtual Iron offers LiveMigration in place of VMotion.

The Lowell, Mass., firm has previous received $8 million in 2003, $12 million in 2004, $11.5 million in 2005, and $13.5 million in July 2007, according to company spokesmen. The same backers have been involved in the previous rounds. Intel is interested in speeding up adoption of virtualization via investment through its venture capital arm because virtualized servers in many cases thrive with the latest versions of its chips. Hooks to the hypervisor have been built into the chips instruction set to speed some forms of virtualization processing requirements.

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