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Obsidian joins Open Virtualisation Alliance


Johannesburg, 25 Jul 2012

Obsidian Systems has further entrenched its position as a leading provider of enterprise open source in southern Africa by joining the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA), a global collection of platform and system providers dedicated to promoting open virtualisation as an alternative to proprietary solutions.

"Apart from being big supporters of anything open source, we also support the OVA's mission to make people aware that there are far greater benefits to adopting an open virtualisation model," says Obsidian MD Muggie van Staden. "With virtualisation and cloud services at the top of IT executives' priorities, it is prudent to drive awareness of the benefits of an open source solution.

"Unless organisations go this route, they are simply building silos in the cloud that effectively tie them into proprietary systems. The danger in this is that they're limited to fewer platforms, and therefore shifting workloads, or even service providers, become problematic."

The OVA aims to increase overall awareness and understanding of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and thereby promote the adoption of KVM as an open virtualisation alternative. It is also dedicated to accelerating the emergence of third-party KVM solutions, while encouraging interoperability and best practices in the field.

Van Staden says there is still some education needed around cloud and virtualisation services, particularly as more organisations adopt the technology, which carries a greater risk if they do so without assessing all the options.

"There has been a natural progression of organisations starting with server consolidation, moving to virtualisation and then internal cloud infrastructure and services," he suggests. "Once these services have been bedded down, the trend is to then start adopting public cloud services for selected functionality. It is once they enter this domain that the choice of providers balloons... if the service is based on open source technology."

Van Staden believes that the learnings, networking and collaboration that it will enjoy as an OVA member will stand Obsidian in good stead as it is better able to stay abreast of the latest trends and technologies. Obsidian customers will reap these benefits by default as these best practices are progressively incorporated into Obsidian's operations.

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Obsidian

Obsidian, provider of enterprise open source in southern Africa, offers open source and related technology services, including training, consulting, products and solutions. Since starting in 1995, Obsidian has grown to become the premier OSS solutions provider.

Web: www.obsidian.co.za

Twitter: @obsidianza

Editorial contacts

Ian Rodney
Cerebra Communication
(+27) 11 465 5709
ian@cerebra.co.za