Stopping Intel sprawl

With an eye toward helping customers save money by consolidating servers, applications and operating systems , a host of vendors are offering systems that combine multiple servers and storage systems into pools of computing power that grow and shrink in response to business demands - a concept known as virtualization.

In addition to products from big-name companies such as HP, IBM, Microsoft and Sun, VMware  this week is expected to update its server virtualization software for Intel-based servers.

IBM next year plans to add virtualization support to its pSeries and iSeries servers to help users carve up pieces of CPUs, so that a small application could run on as little as one-tenth of a CPU, says Nick Bowen, vice president of Unix and xSeries server software development at IBM.

Today, partitions can only be as small as a single CPU. In addition, IBM is planning an intelligent workload manager that automatically will detect usage needs, and add or subtract virtual resources on the fly. HP is planning similar features for its servers.

"Then we're going to virtualize the I/O because when you get into the model where you have these relatively small CPUs, you don't need native I/O for all of them," Bowen says. So multiple virtual servers could share Ethernet cards or storage interconnects, for example. "Now you take the virtual capability, and not only do the consolidation, but also really take this on-demand thought to a completely different level," he says.

The idea of turning proliferating Intel boxes into more-manageable shared resources is helping spur the adoption of virtualization technology, analysts say. IDC expects the market for virtual machine software for Intel-based systems to grow from about $30 million today to more than several hundred million dollars by 2006.

"It's certainly hyperbolic for anything on the market today to claim to provide true utility computing," says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. "But technology like VMware's virtual machine is going to be part of any broader utility computing down the road."

The major systems vendors seem to agree. VMware has garnered considerable support from Dell , HP and IBM, which sell and support VMware on their Intel servers. The 5-year-old company has a lengthy client list, including CitiBank, Google and Merrill Lynch, and already is profitable, with revenue expected to top $50 million in 2003.

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Still, the idea of virtualizing system resources is nothing new. IBM has used the technology in its mainframes for 30 years, and partitioning capabilities have been introduced on high-end Unix machines from HP, IBM and Sun. What is new is the ability to run reliable, secure virtual machines on low-end Intel boxes.

Microsoft's entry into the market, with its acquisition of Connectix earlier this year, is one example of the growing interest in Intel-based virtualization. Connectix Virtual Server isn't expected to be released until year-end, and analysts agree that VMware has a strong lead in the market. However, with the Microsoft threat looming, VMware is focused more than ever on ensuring that its mainframe-class virtualization software evolves to meet the demands of businesses as it moves from its test-environment roots to becoming more of a staple in production platforms.