Hitachi Takes The Virtualization Servers One Step Further

The virtualization market which is aimed at enterprises and data centers is fast becoming a very popular target for the big hardware manufacturing companies that are struggling to carve themselves a niche on that growing market. As virtualization software applications can always put to good use every little bit of hardware support, Hitachi America, a division of the Hitachi Corporation, will soon start shipping a server that includes a built-in hypervisor.

Hitachi integrated the said virtualization hypervisor into a Xeon based version of the server system BladeSymphony 1000 which also integrates the company's specific Virtage technology. This technology is also integrated into the Itanium based server systems built by the same company and the hardware level embedded hypervisor is expected to give Hitachi an enduring advantage over the other server manufacturing companies as it provides increased performance and security features.

Servers based on dual-core and quad-core Intel Xeon processors that integrate the hardware hypervisor are now available for all levels of a data center including edge, application and database while providing users with the option to mix different kinds of servers based on Intel processing units. This is one of the unique capabilities of the BladeSymphony 1000 line of products and on the practical level it allows users to deploy in a virtualized environment just about any type of workload, ranging from applications and Web services to multi-threaded, mission-critical processing tasks.

''By extending Hitachi Virtage to Intel Xeon-based platforms, Hitachi brings embedded virtualization to a whole new class," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group. "Together, Intel and Hitachi have once again answered the call of enterprise customers by giving them the added choice they have come to expect."

Virtage allows Hitachi to load its hypervisor into the firmware of the service processor housed on the chassis of the blade server which directly translates into the ability to span a single workload across several blade systems that are sharing a single chassis, while allowing the manufacturing company a lower level access to the hardware layer of the components.

Since the hypervisor is running at a low level, directly on top of the hardware components, the performance boost should be significant and at the same time, because the hypervisor is protected from most types of attacks, those servers that integrate such a system should be better protected against security breaches.

On the operating system side, the news site theregister claims that the entire Virtage technology will work out of the box with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, without the need to install and configure any special drives. It also requires no separate operating system layer or any additional virtualization software or hardware components so it is able to share resources without a performance penalty.

According to Hitachi this new technology is bridging the gap between mainframes and x86 compatible server systems, as it brings increased performance, reliability and transparent virtualization to the BladeSymphony line of products.