Microsoft
is broadening its efforts in the highly technical area of
virtualization — a practice that essentially decouples various parts of
a computer system, including hardware and software, to give
information-technology managers more flexibility. The company is
acquiring San Jose, Calif.-based Calista Technologies, which works on
desktop-virtualization technology. Among other moves, Microsoft is
changing how it prices and licenses its software to encourage
virtualization; rolling out new tools for managing virtualization in
different situations; and broadening its partnerships with other
companies in the area. Enthusiasm for virtualization, which has been in
use for decades, has grown recently and was highlighted when VMware
went public last summer in one of the most successful tech IPOs of 2007.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company’s shares more than doubled in its
first two months on the stock market and finished last week at $80.27,
up nearly 41 percent. It announced an acquisition of its own last week,
buying Thinstall, another desktop-virtualization company. One use of
virtualization involves separating the software running on a server in
a data center away from the physical machine. That way, if the data
center were threatened by a natural disaster, the server’s applications
could be easily transmitted to a different data center out of harm’s
way. Virtualization also can be used to divide a single server into
individual “virtual” machines, each insulated from the other and
capable of running its own operating system and application. This
improves efficiency by using more of each server’s computing power, 85
to 95 percent of which goes unused in most IT departments. It will be a
tough fight against VMWare though…
Source: Seattle Times
