Oracle unveils virtualisation offering

 

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Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 10:38

Oracle is taking on VMWare in the virtualisation software market, unveiling a product which it claims is three times more efficient than rival offerings.

The virtualisation market is currently dominated by VMware, but analysts say Oracle's announcement could have a significant effect on the landscape.

"Is this bad news for VMware? Yes," says Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research. "This tells us that the virtualisation market will not belong to VMware. One of the players will be Oracle. Until today that news has not been factored into the stock price."

When asked if VMware was concerned about the challenge from Oracle, Vice President Parag Patel responds, "We believe customers want a consistent approach to virtualisation that has a proven track record with mission critical deployments and a complete offering."

Customers can download "Oracle VM" for free, however, the company will be selling service contracts for the product which will range in price from $499 to $999 per year.

The company has yet to detail how it arrived at the three times faster value, however, an entry on the company's virtualisation FAQ pages claims:

"Oracle ran many performance benchmarks comparing Oracle products running with Oracle VM against the existing leading server virtualization product and also with Oracle products on non-virtualized operating systems on x86 and x86-64. Oracle consistently saw much better resource utilization with an average of three times less overhead using Oracle VM, and also saw significant scalability with virtual SMP. In many cases, the comparison with real hardware was approximately equal in performance."

Author: Reuters & Stuart Turton