Midsize biz backs server virtualisation

Interest in server virtualisation among US medium-size businesses increased significantly in the past year, reports eWeek.

This is according to Access Markets International (AMI) Partners' latest MB tracking study which found the percentage of US medium -size businesses that consider server virtualisation strategically important has increased from 46% to 75%.

Melissa Chong, manager of managed services at AMI, said 2009 was the turning point for server virtualisation usage among US medium-size businesses, accelerated by the affects of the economic downturn as midmarket CIOs and IT managers looked for ways to cut IT costs and boost asset utilisation. “

A new open-source operating system will come with the option of creating one-time, disposable virtual machines on the fly as a way to protect against malicious files, says Information Week.

Invisible Things Lab is creating these lightweight, throwaway VMs that work with traditional virtual machines in Qubes, the open-source, Xen-based OS it plans to release in beta later this summer. Qubes was architected to minimise the attack surface in the VM environment.

Disposable VMs do not provide persistent storage and are released on a per-document basis to open a PDF, PowerPoint, or music or video file, for instance, according to Joanna Rutkowska, founder and CEO of Invisible Things Lab.

Running virtual servers is now standard practice for many companies, but working out how to charge other business units for using them remains a far from easy task, states IT News.

According to IDC, just under 20% of servers shipped in the fourth quarter of 2009 were virtualised.

"Customers are quickly moving beyond the core hypervisor and focusing on mobility, self-provisioning, and metering and chargeback capabilities," IDC VP of enterprise platforms Matt Eastwood suggested earlier this year.