Rumors surfaced yesterday of an Oracle acquisition of Virtual Iron. Speculation is abounding as to why Oracle would go after Virtual Iron.
I have recently completed an in-depth product profile of Virtual Iron 4.5, and was impressed by its capabilities. Virtual Iron focuses its product on the small to medium enterprise market, offering VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 like features for a much lower price. When ranked against Burton Group’s Hypervisor ranking criteria (see Chris Wolf’s blog on Production-class Hypervisor Evaluation Criteria), Virtual Iron scored one of the highest scores just behind VMware by meeting 83% of the required criteria. What’s most interesting is that where Virtual Iron falls short is in its product lifecycle support policies and enterprise management infrastructure integration. Virtual Iron targets small to medium businesses that are willing to give up enterprise level support for a much lower price and don’t need enterprise management integration. If we take out these two areas of missed evaluation criteria, Virtual Iron would rank 100% - better than the other competitors and in-line with VMware for required features. Now this says something of the technical value that Virtual Iron brings to the x86 virtualization market. Note, however, that Virtual Iron meets less than 50% of the preferred and optional features, further underscoring its small to medium business target market.
To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, Data Center Strategies: Virtual Iron Acquired by Oracle Rumor?
Article Tags