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Maybe the Dell strategy for fabric computing isn’t clear yet, but its approach to virtualization definitively is: so far the company closed a number of OEM agreements with vendors in different areas to build a rich product portfolio without having to own one, and directly compete against VMware or other major players.

The list includes Reflex Systems (March 2009), Quest/Vizioncore and Novell/Platespin (both September 2008),

Dell may no interest in playing a major role in the hardware virtualization space, but it may have some in other, emerging markets.
The company in fact just announced the acquisition of KACE, the US firm focused on system management that launched an application virtualization platform in 2009.

KACE acquired it in September 2008 from a startup called Computers in Motion, and relaunched it in March 2009 as Virtual Kontainers.

The KACE go-to-market strategy seemed pretty similar to the Altiris one (which was acquired by Symantec in April 2008): the application virtualization layer isn’t there to solve the desktop virtualization challenges by offering an alternative to virtual machines; it must be considered an add-on to enrich the enterprise management system, since the virtualized applications can be easily deployed, updated and removed from a single point of control compared to “traditional” software.

So far Virtual Kontainers didn’t have much traction (the entire application virtualization market isn’t), even if KACE introduced an interesting way to solve the ISVs support challenge in version 2.0.  
The Dell interest, at least looking at the press announcement, seems solely focused on the KACE system management technology and its KBOX physical appliances, but the OEM would certainly have the resources to push application virtualization towards a broader adoption.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Acquisitions, Dell, KACE

As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Cisco is leading a new trend in computing architectures by pushing for datacenter-in-a-box solutions, where the entire computing stack is designed and integrated to work as a whole.

It is the Apple philosophy applied to the data center. Or a modern interpretation of mainframes, if you prefer.

Oracle, thanks to the acquisition of Sun, announced its plan to do the same. In some ways HP is already going in the same direction, and may release more interesting solutions in the near future now that it has 3Com. 
IBM seems more interested in POWER architecture than in these x86 computing blocks.

What about Dell?

Today PC World published an article revealing that the computer manufacturer will launch a new line of computers, CloudEdge, designed by its Data Center Solutions division, for “cloud computing” infrastructures.

Dell is moving from custom designed hardware to standardized products that plans to sell to a wider audience, from public cloud computing providers to large enterprises.
Dell also plans to bundle these systems with Microsoft and VMware hypervisors, plus the orchestration framework provided by Scalent.

The whole thing is quite surprising considering that Dell already has an OEM agreement with Egenera, the US startup that offers a datacenter-in-a-box product since much earlier than Cisco and others.
Egenera already supports hypervisors, and includes the orchestration layer needed to control the whole computing stack.
Why Dell prefers to develop a new class of machines rather than using something that is already selling and that is tailored for fabric computing?

Labels: Cloud Computing, Dell, Fabric Computing

virtualization.info has learned that Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Global Infrastructure Consulting Services at Dell, left the company last week.

Oglesby is one of the most popular names in the virtualization industry, author of the bestsellers VMware ESX Server 2.5 Advanced Technical Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide.
He was one of the premiere speakers at our Virtualization Congress 2009 and he appears on virtualization.info from time to time as guest columnist (see his last article here: Is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization?).

Rumors report Oglesby as the new Chief Solution Architect at Unidesk (still unconfirmed).

Unidesk is a US startup founded in December 2007, funded by Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture with a $8.1M Round A, and focused on VDI.
The company tried to launch a couple of times in the past two years (one in August 2008), and now their product, based on a patent-pending Composite Virtualization technology, is in private beta.

Labels: Dell, Leadership, Unidesk

By now every virtualization.info reader should know that Cisco is about to enter the x86 server market with a brand new blade system codenamed California.
We broke the news in early December 2008, unveiling that the product will feature a massive hardware set and an unprecedented (for the company) unification of server, networking and storage resources.

Anyway so far nor virtualization.info neither the mainstream press that confirmed the news really clarified how this unification is implemented and why Cisco should be especially relevant in the virtualization industry.
Bundling the new blade system with the upcoming VMware vSphere 4.0 and the upcoming virtual switch Nexus 1000V is notable but not something the company could call Unified Computing like it’s doing since months now.

There’s a good chance we’ll know next Monday, when Cisco is expected to announce its new strategy. But for now we can speculate on what codename California will really be.

First of all, it’s unlikely that Cisco decides to invade a mature and highly competitive market like this the x86 server one unless it strongly believes it can find an untapped opportunity. There’s plenty of niche and emerging markets where Cisco is and will earn much higher profits at a fraction of the effort (the portable HD cameras is one of them).

Secondarily, it’s unlikely that Cisco really believes it can compete against consolidated leaders like HP, IBM, Dell, etc. in this market by offering VMware vSphere 4.0 through an OEM agreement.
All of the are doing exactly the same since a long time.

So the Cisco blade system, specifically designed for virtualization, must do something more, much more than what it’s currently disclosed.
As suggested in a previous article, the most probable scenario is that Cisco is integrating in a seamless way its very old VFrame Data Center orchestration platform (a product acquired from TopSpin in 2005) with vSphere, maybe using the vCloud APIs that VMware is about to offer in the new platform.

The resulting platform is far away from what HP and IBM offer today and much, much closer (actually competing) with the Egenera solution.

Egenera offers a software/hardware cloud-in-a-box platform called BladeFrame that blends together an orchestration product (PAN Manager) with a leading hypervisor (Citrix XenServer).
The blade system is OEMed by Dell under the name of PAN System and by Fujitsu Siemens under the name of Primergy BladeFrame.

So if Cisco is going to compete with somebody in the x86 market that is not HP or IBM, but more likely Egenera, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and all the other partners that will OEM the PanManager solution.

And this will validate the Egenera approach more than a hundred of case histories.
The company, which is reportedly under scrutiny for acquisition, may sell in the blink of an eye.

Labels: Cisco, Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu Siemens

Dell doesn’t seem interested in becoming a major virtualization player on its own but continues to stack up 3rd party solutions to build its product portfolio.

In September 2008 the company signed an OEM agreement with both PlateSpin (a Novell subsidiary) and Vizioncore (a Quest subsidiary), in December 2008 signed a similar deal with Egenera.

Now it’s the time of Reflex Systems, the US startup that changed its name (formerly known as Reflex Security) and go-to-market strategy at the end of last year. 
The OEM agreement only covers the new multi-hypervisor management tool that Reflex unveiled in November: Virtualization Management Center (VMC).

Definitively a good restart for a company that struggled to find success in the virtualization security market.

Labels: Alliances, Dell, Reflex Systems

Last week mainstream news magazines Network World and Business Journal suggested that two major IT vendors, Novell and Dell, are ready to make some acquisitions in the virtualization space.

Network World is reporting the Novell President and CEO’s words:

...Novell is now planning to extend the technology to provide tools to users that will enable them to move workloads from virtual environments to a cloud computing model…

Business Journal instead is speculating that Dell may want to acquire Egenera, countering the HP’s acquisition of Opsware:

Dell officials have suggested that it’s time for the company to do more deals to expand its revenue base to compete with rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
The question is: Will it gamble on large acquisitions or continue with a track record of relatively conservative deals?

On top of the rumors above, this week CNET is reporting that Cisco plans to sell $4 billion in bonds to raise some cash.
Part of this money ($500 million) will be used to pay floating rate debt. The rest could be used to buy some somebody at the virtualization shopping mall.

CNET goes as far as suggesting that Cisco may want to buy EMC, but that’s definitively more expensive than $3.5 billion.

Labels: Acquisitions, Cisco, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Novell

More than one year ago Egenera announced a major change in its go-to-market strategy, finally allowing some partners to OEM its cloud-computing-in-a-box software: Pan Manager.

The first and only company answering the call so far has been Fujitsu Siemens. But yesterday Egenera finally announced its second partner, and it is a really desirable one: Dell.

The two signed an OEM agreement for the North America (to be extended in EMEA and APAC during 2009) that rules the distribution of Pan Manager with a massive Dell rack featuring 192 CPU cores and 1536 GB RAM.
And this is just the beginning. Dell and Egenera are jointly developing a new solution platform that will launched in Q1 2009.

Unfortunately the Pan Manager that ships with the Dell system still includes vmBuilder 2.1, which embeds Citrix XenServer 4.1 (meaning no support for Windows Server 2008 guests).
Over the course of 2009 Egenera plans to update vmBuilder to 2.2 and include XenServer 5.0.

Labels: Alliances, Dell, Egenera

Today the analysis firm IDC released some surprising numbers about virtualization vendors market share:

• VMware: 44% (combining ESX and Server)
• Microsoft: 23% (combining Hyper-V and Virtual Server)

Isn’t clear how much of these market shares translates in production deployments and how much is about test & development or shelfware, but one thing is for sure: the Microsoft gain is remarkable (and its growing case studies library confirms it) even if VMware still leads with 78% revenue share.

Besides the numbers above there is something else that is interesting: worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year, compared to a 72% year-over-year increase the previous quarter.

Who ships more servers for virtualization duties? HP (34% market share) followed by Dell (25%) and IBM (16%).

Update: Easy to guess the report above generated a huge number of reactions (and complains from VMware).

Specifically IDC is questioned on several obscure points:

• In its previous report about virtualization market shares, about Q1 2008, IDC assigned 20% to Microsoft.
  Hyper-V was formally released on June 26, 2008, which is two days before the end of Q2. So it seems unlikely that Hyper-V could get 3% in just two business days.
  As some virtualization.info pointed in the comments it’s very likely that IDC included in this count also beta and RC deployments. If so the numbers couldn’t reflect the real state of the market because VMware tents to keep ESX betas private (like for the upcoming ESX 4.0).
• Unlike the past, this time IDC didn’t compare its findings with VMware and refused to break out the reported numbers for each product.
• There’s an incongruence between the VMware estimated year over year growth (52%) and the real one reported by VMware to the SEC (39%) for the Q2 2008.

For all these reasons we expect an official statement from IDC clarifying the methodology that provided the market shares.

Meanwhile it’s worthwhile to answer a question that Mike DiPetrillo raised in the comments: why a 23% market share for Microsoft should be considered remarkable? The answer we can give:

• Because it didn’t go lower despite ESX 3.5 Update 2 introduced a huge advantage in terms of features and most VMware efforts in marketing is focused on highlighting such difference
• Because one would assume (maybe incorrectly) that customers started to dismiss Virtual Server in the last few months. In such case Hyper-V may have some more than 3% market share.

Labels: Dell, HP, IBM, Market Trends, Microsoft, VMware