Xen has been out for quite a while now, but it seems like only recently that the "Xen train" has really started to pick up steam. Perhaps that is because the virtualization market as a whole is itself starting to take off in the eyes of the industry.

By 2007, IDC expects the virtualization market to reach $18 billion... yes, billion. Just look at the latest numbers reported by EMC for the virtualization market leader, VMware. Reported revenue for the second quarter of 2006 was $157 million, which translates to a growth rate of 73%. If that trend continues for VMware, the company could be looking at a $630 million annual revenue. Figures like that are what keeps pulling people into this market as they vie for their own slice of the pie.

Xen was originally developed at Cambridge University, and numerous large, well known companies had a hand early on with the research project. Xen is open-source virtualization software that, like the more famous VMware, allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on the same physical server.

Last week seemed to be the week of Xen announcements, where passengers started to line up for that "Xen train".

Perhaps the biggest shock was Microsoft announcing that it was going to team up with the open-source virtualization vendor - XenSource. The two companies announced that they would cooperate with each other on the development of technology to foster interoperability between their respective virtualization platforms.

IBM, which pioneered virtualization back in the 1960's for its mainframe systems, also punched its ticket to ride the Xen train. They announced last week that the company would support Xen on its server and blade platforms that run on Intel and AMD processors, and that its middleware will also support the virtualization technology.

Novell climbed aboard last week as well, as it announced the official release of its latest operating system platform - SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, which has Xen technology baked in.

Red Hat isn't far behind its competitor, Novell. They too plan to offer a distribution of Red Hat Linux containing Xen 3.0 sometime later this year. And Sun Microsystems has also recently come out and said they plan to support Xen in Solaris 10 by mid-2007.

Everyone seems to want this technology now. And the Xen passenger list seems to keep growing as companies continue to sign-up in hopes of getting a piece of that multi-billion dollar pie.

Posted by David Marshall on July 22, 2006 06:35 AM