ZD.Net: Open Virtualization Alliance continues its amazing growth

Summary: When capabilities of a technology come close to that offered by others and the cost is significantly lower, a technology can grow to overcome established competitors. KVM is moving in that direction.

Once again, the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) is demonstrating the progress it is making to popularize KVM, the kernel based virtual machine software that is a standard part of the Linux kernel. The message this time is that the organization is experiencing significant growth in membership in emerging markets. Cloud computing suppliers are interested in finding ways to deliver products and services that are heavily reliant on virtual machine technology at a lower cost. Quite often these companies see the commercial offerings from VMware, Citrix and Oracle as being too costly or have too-restrictive licensing or terms and conditions attached to their use. OVA points out that KVM offers key advantages to these companies because it is open, doesn’t lock them in to a single vendor’s virtual machine software solution.

A majority of OVA members are involved with cloud computing

A large percentage of OVA members, more than 50 percent, are focused on providing cloud computing products or services. The alliance believes that KVM is an attractive solution because it helps these companies reduce their software costs, increase the number of virtual servers a physical system can support, improve overall workload performance for cloud computing environments. The technology, OVA comments, should also improve security and workload scalability as well.

KVM fits the needs of companies in emerging markets

OVA is growing rapidly in emerging markets such as Asia Pacific and Latin America. Companies in these markets have strong requirements to be able to start and maintain their operations with a minimum of investment. Open source software fits those requirements very well. OVA believes that KVM will follow the same trajectory as other open source software projects, such as Linux or MySQL, and quickly become an important standard in these markets.

More of the ZD.Net article from Dan Kusnetzky

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.