$2 billion investment by Claudia Sonea

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz made public at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco that a $2 billion open-source virtualization platform will be soon launched. He explained the necessity for any data center to operate in a virtualized mode in the next three to seven years. Therefore Sun wants to extend virtualization beyond simple server consolidation to all functions of a data center (network and storage, to applications and hardware provisioning). Sun's first product is used to enable virtualized data centers to run on x86/64 and Sparc systems from hardware vendors such as Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and IBM. It is called xVM hypervisor, a lightweight kernel that inherits virtualization technologies from Solaris while supporting Linux, Windows, and Solaris. Another product is a scalable data center automation tool called xVM Ops Center and also a new community for developers building data center virtualization and management technologies. Like all the other Sun businesses this will also have support agreements for a fee so that customers making deployments will have someone to call. AMD, Intel, Red Hat, and Symantec not only they expressed their support for Sun's effort, but offered practical aid like Red Hat collaborating in order to certify and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest on Sun xVM. Dell is another partner that together with Sun will promote the distribution of Sun's Solaris OS on Dell's PowerEdge servers. Furthermore the new relationship benefits both Dell that will have broader reach into the global free software community with Solaris and OpenSolaris, while Sun gains access to channels and customers across the volume marketplace, according to Dell CEO Michael Dell. This is good news, so cheers Sun!

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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