News.com reports about “the move will help EMC reach further into the world of utility computing, a trend sweeping the industry as companies search for ways to make information technology easier to manage and more efficiently used.” VMware makes software to enable multiple operating systems to run on a single machine concurrently.
Adds NYTimes: “VMware is more of a departure. The private company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., makes software that allows a computer to run different operating systems at the same time, or several versions of the same operating system. This kind of software, known as a virtual machine, has been used since the 1960’s on mainframe computers. But VMware’s technology is tailored for lower-cost machines powered by chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices, running Microsoft’s Windows or Linux, an operating system distributed free…Such low-cost server computers are increasingly common in corporate data centers, and VMware’s software increases their efficiency, yielding further cost savings. The VMware purchase moves EMC into the market for server software at the heart of the data center.”
One of the ideas I have been thinking about is the need for a low-cost VMWare-like application to enable Linux and Windows (with terminal services enabled) to run in parallel on a server.
