* Several vendors announce new products to support virtualization
Virtualization is staying a hot technology as several vendors announced new products to support it.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) recently announced it would give energy rebates to businesses that replaced old servers in their data centers and virtualized their environments on servers that use energy-efficient processors.
The incentive program, which is supported by VMware and Intel, will encourage companies to virtualize their environments on servers using power-saving processors like the Intel Xeon 5100.
Through the program, companies will be able to consolidate their data centers and replace a large number of existing servers.
Companies who are customers of PG&E, can apply for the rebate before they begin a consolidation project. If they qualify for the rebate, they could earn a maximum rebate amount of $4 million per project site.
Customers participating in the program can also expect to save $300 to $600 in energy costs for each server that is removed.
Virtualization, according to PG&E, can increase server utilization rates by 10 to 15 times. HP, Dell, IBM and Rackable Systems are all working with Intel to promote PG&E’s energy rebate program.
Opsware last week launched software that manages the lifecycle of physical and virtual servers. Called Opsware Virtualization Director, the software allows provisioning and patching of physical and virtual servers.
The software allows IT to create, secure and control virtual servers in an automated fashion and track dependencies between virtual and physical elements.
Opsware Virtualization Director works with VMware and Solaris 10. Support for Microsoft Virtual Server and XenSource Enterprise will follow.
Opsware Virtualization Director is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2007.
