Last night we broke the news that web hosting company Media Temple is bringing virtualization to Dedicated Physical Servers, with its Nitro product. Today there is further virtualization news, with HP acquiring two companies in this domain: a $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware (which Netscape founder Marc Andreessen co-founded, under the name LoudCloud) and a $214 million purchase of Neoware.
Opsware makes automation software for data center operations. As the WSJ explained, it originally focused on Internet “hosting” and related services during its first three years in existence. Neoware is a provider of thin client computing (where a computer depends primarily on a centralized server for hosting applications and processing data) and virtualization solutions.
ZDNet’s Between the Lines has a great summary of the news. Also Marc Andreessen has an interesting post detailing the history of Opsware (btw I am loving his blog!). He wrote:
“In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway — by startups and big companies alike — required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.”
Larry Dignan wrote a nice overview of virtualization back in February 2005. The aim is for companies to create a virtual infrastructure:
“They now expect hardware and software to work reliably, like a car engine. Their goal is to automate everything they possibly can, even in the data center. And just worry about changing the oil, when maintenance is needed.”
What does all this have to do with the Web? Well the fact that Andreessen helped build Opsware in 1999 at the height of the Dot Com boom explains that. It is a natural IT evolution for companies to control their hardware via software that runs over servers – a trend that was heightened when Internet servers became popular. So just as you can now control a dedicated physical server using virtualization (over the Internet), companies can automate their hardware using Opsware or manage individual PCs via a server with Neoware.
What other virtualization trends are you seeing with the Web in 2007?
