Red Hat targets competitors

Red Hat has rivals VMware and Sun Microsystems in its sights with its new open source virtualisation products, says Reseller News.

Enterprise Linux, Virtualisation Manager for Servers, and Virtualisation Manager for Desktops are aimed at taking on established regional players.

But Sun Microsystems New Zealand country manager, John Mazenier, says he is not concerned by Red Hat's venture into virtualisation. “Competition is healthy because you've got to up your game and be better than the last guy.”

A global survey shows more than 50% of businesses are moving to virtualised servers, and an increasing number are pondering cloud computing, states vnunet.

More than half of US and European businesses have already implemented x86 server virtualisation or plan to do so within the next year, according to Forrester Research.

The analyst's survey also showed 5% of firms investing in hosted virtual servers on a pay-per-use basis, with 3% implementing this cloud computing model in the next year. The figures for small and medium-sized enterprises are 2% now and 2% next year.

Before embarking on a full-blown virtualisation roll-out, many organisations try a small pilot first, which is the approach the Northern Ireland Civil Service has taken, reports Computer Weekly.

IT Assist, which was set up in April 2007 as a result of consolidating and centralising eight separate departments, started its virtualisation pilot project about 12 months ago.

Caron Alexander, head of technology for the IT Assist shared service centre at the Northern Ireland Civil Service says, "It is important to start small and prove that the technology works in order to build confidence and get stakeholder buy-in. With a small project, people can see the benefits quickly, without there being high upfront costs and that makes it much easier to move forward and do bigger things."