Virtualization Sector Heats Up with Talk of Virtual Iron Software Buyout
Oracle Corp.’s announcement last week of its intent to buy Lowell-based Virtual Iron Software Inc. has pundits and analysts predicting a war for virtualization territory between Oracle and VMWare Inc., the subsidiary of EMC Corporation.
The pending acquisition will add a virtual server management component to Oracle VM.
CEOs of other small virtualization software companies in New England are betting big virtualization products need plenty of such extensions. If server virtualization’s hype is to be believed, the technology dismisses concerns about availability and server capacity at the flip of a switch. Without additional management and tools, that promise may be oversold.
As companies virtualize more of their IT environments, retrieving those advantages requires as much strategy and effort as managing an investment in hardware, said Philip Dawson, vice president of research at Gartner Inc. and agenda manager for virtualization. In fact, sometimes companies can get to the same goals — better efficiency and availability — by consolidating some hardware systems, he said.
“I think virtualization and consolidation are not mutually exclusive,” Dawson said. “You cannot virtualize everything. You might just consolidate some things. You might just manage things better.”
Stratus Technologies Inc. is hoping companies agree. The Maynard-based firm launched in 1980 as a boutique server manufacturer, providing services, software and hardware aimed at eliminating down time. The company now offers virtual servers on its proprietary hardware, which it says meet customers’ needs even when a second of outage is unacceptable.
“If you’re mixing chemicals in an industrial process, seconds count,” said Denny Lane, director of product marketing and management at the 590-person company. Last week, Stratus announced it had secured a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration to provide a virtual computing environment for the agency’s international message switching system.
Meanwhile, relative newcomer VKernel Corp. is hoping companies — particularly small businesses such as those served by Virtual Iron — will use its software to manage their virtual environments. The Portsmouth, N.H.-based company raised a $7.1 million Series B round of funding earlier this month.
Storage is expensive, noted VKernel CEO and founder Alex Bakman. “Because virtual servers are so easy to create at the flick of a button, people have created so many virtual servers so quickly, they’re basically filling up the capacity they paid big money for.”
VKernel provides transparency so IT managers can see what servers have been deployed and where. “Clearly they can’t continue what they’re doing today, which is grabbing physical servers, throwing them into virtual and scaling that,” Bakman said. “That model is not going to scale.”
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