Tangible Deal for Virtual IT

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January 19, 2004 (Computerworld) -- Just 20 minutes after the ink was dry on the deal for EMC to buy VMware Inc. for over $600 million in cash, I spoke with VMware CEO Dianne Greene and asked her to recount the drama and excitement of the acquisition.
She balked.
She wanted to talk about customers.
She wanted to tell me how integrating storage, networking and operating system virtualization was going to make it easier and cheaper for companies to run their data centers.
She told me it made sense for customers that VMware didn't link up with a proprietary hardware vendor such as IBM or Hewlett-Packard.
She told me how Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware would retain its independent sales force and added, with a humility not often seen in Silicon Valley, that VMware was lucky because Linux's popularity made it commonplace for data centers to confront multiple operating systems.
She wanted to stick to business
That's reassuring, since most IT mergers are perilous attempts at cost savings that ultimately hurt customers.
In a sense, VMware's customers have been clamoring for a combination of virtualization technologies at the corporate level. It just doesn't make sense to do storage, networking and operating system virtualization in silos. And customers who worry about working with storage vendors other than EMC shouldn't be concerned, since Greene said that as an independent subsidiary, VMware will continue to share application programming interfaces with other storage vendors.
Combining storage and networking virtualization moves the technology from a tool designed for server consolidation to a strategic part of IT infrastructure. It's the way to provision and monitor performance, control access rights and maintain clone copies of your application stack. It also lets you take a running virtual operating system that's already network-connected and move it across machines while transactions are occurring. It's an effective way to add memory and do load balancing. And this takes hours rather than days. Clones for disaster recovery aren't as much of a headache, and you can move pools of machines to where they're needed.
Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman says enterprises should change their thinking about consolidation and pursue a server virtualization strategy rather than a server consolidation project. EMC's purchase of VMware should make that easier to accomplish.
Pimm Fox is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif. Contact him at pimmfox@pacbell.net.
See more columns by Pimm Fox.

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