Competitors Respond
Despite the recent Cisco, EMC, VMware announcement, the reality is that the majority of the market will continue to buy virtualization offerings from the likes of the major “piece part” suppliers – Dell, HP, IBM, etc. – and that is perfectly fine. There is a more aggressive, higher-end customer base who will desire, then require, the likes of the VCE coalition to move them to the next level. Over time, IBM, HP, Dell, and others will develop their own initiatives and capabilities aimed at this slice of the market, but the fact is they will be just fine continuing to serve the more mainstream markets.
A recent hypervisor poll on ESG’s analyst Steve O’Donnell’s site, The Hot Aisle, exposed some interesting data regarding the use of multiple hypervisors:
- 96% of respondents use at least one hypervisor
- 44% of respondents use two or more hypervisors
- 16% of respondents use three or more hypervisors
Choosing to deploy multiple hypervisors should come as no surprise as IT operations:
- Try to keep pace with virtualization deployment demand, but is cost constrained and unable to purchase additional licenses, infrastructure, and services to support their initial goals. IT begins thinking of a tiered strategy to maintain production workloads on their existing virtualization platform and use another hypervisor for test/dev and staging.
- Recognize that the feature and performance gap has closed to the point that there is more than one choice for production workloads.
- Contend with licensing and support costs leading them to explore free solutions.
Citrix has even recently announced project “Open Door” in an effort to encourage existing VMware customers to jump ship and deploy XenServer or Hyper-V.
“Through March 2010, customers who switch existing VMware servers to XenServer or Hyper-V, and add Citrix Essentials for advanced virtualization management, will receive additional technical support, training, and conversion tools from Citrix at no cost.”
As a result of this week’s Cisco, EMC, VMware news, I’m willing to bet that Citrix and Microsoft are having some productive conversations with Dell, HP, and IBM behind closed doors. They will never get out to the public, nor should they, but I suspect they will impact the market over the next 6 – 12 months.
