IBM Steps Up Virtualisation and SMB Offerings
IBM Steps Up Virtualisation and SMB Offerings
January 30, 2008: IBM has announced that its POWER6 microprocessors will be scaled down for small and medium-sized customers, along with an expanded virtualisation offering.
Formerly known as Advanced POWER Virualisation, IBM has renamed this to PoverVM and is targeting the small and medium-sized market with the highly successful POWER6 based System P and Blade Centre servers. Big blue believes that virtualisation will be the key selling point to this drive, particularly as green-friendly concerns about power consumption motivate people to take up virtualisation.
"Virtualization has typically been in the domain of large enterprises. Today we aim to simplify the adoption of virtualization technologies, making it available to small and medium-sized businesses," said Scott Handy, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Power™ Systems.
According to IDC research, spending on virtualisation is expected to exceed $US 15 Billion ($AU 16.89 Billion) which is a major increase on the $US 6.5 Billion ($AU 7.32 Billion) spent in 2006. This is backed up by Forrester research which reports that awareness of virtualisation by companies with 500-999 employees jumped from 60% to 86% in one year.
IBM also released two new Power6-based Unix servers, the P520 and P550 Express, which the company hopes will entice Solaris and HP/UX customers to switch over, as well as a new version of the flagship i5/OS operating system.