SWsoft Virtuozzo's Version 4 beta

SWsoft is a company that I've been tracking for quite some time. They have a strong presense in the hosting market and a growing presence in large organizations. They offer operating system virtualization/partitioning, desktop virtualization, management for those environments and an increasing number of other things offering a high performance, highly reliable environment for virtual systems. As I've pointed out in other posts, SWsoft offers many of the best features of virtual machine software without much of the overhead. The good folks at SWsoft are pushing the envelope a bit farther with some new technology that they're going to release in beta form by the end of September 2007.

Announcement highlights

Here's a segment of their news relese on the topic:

SWsoft, the world’s second-largest overall virtualization software company, today unveiled the beta version of Virtuozzo 4.0 - SWsoft’s industry-leading operating system (OS) virtualization software for data centers. SWsoft will be demonstrating Virtuozzo 4.0 this week at VMworld in booth 1312 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

SWsoft Virtuozzo is different from traditional hardware virtualization solutions in that it dynamically partitions a single Windows or Linux operating system instance into highly efficient and scalable virtual environments or "containers". Virtuozzo is the only virtualization solution that enables dozens to hundreds of containers to immediately and automatically leverage real hardware, resulting in exceptional datacenter efficiency from administrative, ROI, and energy-consumption perspectives.

Snapshot analysis

SWsoft appears to be addressing some of my key areas of concern about virtual clients and virtual systems including manageability, reliability, and performance. If their track record is any indicator of the future, their products are likely to be innovative and offered at a very reasonable price.

SWsoft, of course, is not operating in a vacuum. Other companies, such as VMware, Virtual Iron and XenSource are running hard to archive many of the same goals. Can SWsoft persuade organizations that their approach is better. Getting IT decision-makers to become aware of SWsoft and its products, consider them and then select them over competitive offerings is always a challenge in such a hotly contested market.

I'd suggest that decision-makers look into SWsoft and decide for themselves. Interested?

To sign up for the beta program, users can go to www.swsoft.com/virtuozzo4/beta