CAM work on the NASA space station
Freedom. He later moved over to large
system design while working on a government contract and subsequently
worked for a messaging and security
startup company in Silicon Valley, taking it public in the mid-1990s. After
starting his own consulting firm, he
began working at his first large financial firm. Seven or eight years later, he
landed at his current company.
Allen Stewart is a Principle Program
Manager Lead in the Window Server
Division at Microsoft. He began his
career working on Unix and Windows
operating systems as a system programmer and then moved on to IBM,
where he worked on Windows systems
a computer hardware and software
emulation company.
Steve Bourne is chair of the ACM
Professions Board. He is a former president of ACM and Editor-in-Chief of the
ACM Queue editorial advisory board. A
fellow alumnus with Simon Crosby,
Bourne received his Ph.D. from Trinity
College, Cambridge. Bourne held management roles at Cisco, Sun, DEC, and
SGI and currently is CTO at El Dorado
Ventures, where he advises the firm on
their technology investments.
steve BouRne: So I’m in this small-to medium-size business (SMB) shop.
You have just told me that I have to balance out the disk and the network with
Xen technology built in, and is one of
HP’s embedded hypervisors. It’s the
perfect mid-market product.
Virtualization today is not a real
“market” and will not be until there
are multiple independent, economically successful vendors. There is one
very successful vendor today, and my
hat’s off to VMware. However, its success is equivalent to the TCP/IP stack
vendors of the early 1990s, before the
stack became a commodity. But things
are about to change because until now
nobody else has played. The change is
that the core value proposition is about
to become free.
With Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor
virtual machine (VM) platform current-
steve Bourne
integration on Wall Street. After IBM,
Stewart joined Microsoft, where for the
first six years he worked as an architect
in the newly formed Financial Services
Group. He then moved into the Windows Server Division Engineering organization to work on Windows Server
releases. His primary focus is virtualization technologies: hardware virtualization, virtualization management,
and application virtualization. Stewart
is a Microsoft Certified Architect and is
on the Board of Directors of the Microsoft Certified Architect Program.
Steve Herrod is the CTO of VMware,
where he’s worked for seven years. Before VMware, Herrod worked in Texas
for companies such as EDS and Bell
Northern Research. Earlier in his career Herrod attended school with Mendel Rosenblum, the founder of VMware, and then worked for TransMeta,
mache creeger
my CPUs. This is all very complicated.
What am I going to do next year?
Gustav: If you want to implement
high up in the service stack today, you
should choose VMware. It’s the one
vendor that sells a fully integrated solution. If you’re an SMB with 20 people,
want maximum flexibility, and want a
single-vendor solution, it’s VMware.
Because to Simon’s earlier point, right
now they’re trying to sell cars; they are
not trying to sell engines.
simon cRosBy: No, SMBs should
choose Citrix XenServer, HP ProLiant
Select Edition, which is an entirely HP-branded product. It is an integrated
virtualization solution that is part of
ProLiant Server, entirely packaged and
managed by HP VMM (Virtual Machine
Manager), which manages Microsoft,
VMware, and XenServer today. It’s got
the bundled HP toolset included, our
allen stewart
ly at $28 and my company’s Xen hypervisor being free, the price of a hypervisor is heading toward free. If you look
at HP’s embedded hypervisor offering
using our product, it is an incredible
value proposition. That same product has more functionality than what
made VMware their first $500 million
of revenue. While VMware has had the
benefit of market lead and brand presence, HP has knocked the value proposition out of the park. Is Citrix with
XenServer an independent viable competitor against VMware? Yes, but that’s
a tough slog. Enabling companies to
create alterative products like Citrix
XenServer, HP ProLiant Select Edition
greatly expands customer choice for a
wide range of market needs.
steve heRRoD: If you’re an SMB with
one thousand employees or less—and
70% of our customers are what we de-