Virtualization with entry-level servers by IBM and Sun

AT YOUR SERVICE

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The top players on the Unix server scene all include virtualization support with their operating systems. We compared two candidates from IBM and Sun.

Crawford Del Prete, Senior Vice President with the market researchers IDC, believes that every decade has its own IT revolution. The sixties were the heyday of the mainframe, which was ousted by the mini-computer ten years later. The client/ server revolution was launched in 1985, and the nineties saw the breakthrough of the Internet. Today’s number one topic is utility computing, that is, the demand-driven computing resources provided as utilities just like electricity or water. Virtualization, which is one major precondition for utility computing, is the field with the strongest growth, says IDC. The analysts predict a market volume of US$ 2.2 billion by 2007 [1].