Scale out versus scale up

While most of the attention is on the big mergers and acquisitions, some startups are trying to shake up the new world order by doing what the behemoths haven't been able to do so far--which makes them good candidates for acquisition if they can ultimately prove themselves. Just look at VMware, which pioneered turning Intel servers into multiple virtual machines. After a few years with products in the market and reaching about $100 million in revenue, EMC bought VMware for $635 million in cash.

Katana Technlogy is a long way from $100 million, but the company (which will be renamed VirtuOS next year) plans to delivers software that less numerous workloads run dynamically on up to 128-dual processor, x86-based Linux servers. It's the scale out mainframe/SMP system, similar to what companies like VMware, Microsoft (Virtual PC 2005), SWsoft and Cassatt are doing with x86-based servers. The major issue, according to Stephen Shankland's story on ZDNet, is that scale-out servers take a significant performance hit in comparison to the far more expensive SMP servers due to slower interconnects between processors and memory. Katana claims that it has a way to overcome the latency, but we won't know until it ships early next year...