XenServer in a box. Literally.

One of our partners, 360is, are probably the foremost XenServer reseller in the UK at the moment. They are certainly the most pro-active and are leading the way in terms of advocating the product over VMWare throughout the end user community, not without success either, I hasten to add. The deserve their success too; they understand it better than anyone and have put a lot of time and effort into the product, both when it was XenSource and since the Citrix acquisition too.

(Now you may think I'm a bit stupid advertising our best partner to all and sundry, but the reality is, my lovely competitors are already constantly on the phone, offering them the world on a plate, so 360is are unfortunately far from the hidden gems they used to be. Still, we've only got Citrix to thank for that I guess...)

Anyway, I went to an event that they held yesterday which I found very interesting. Rob, the MD, asked the audience how many of them were using virtualisation and I don't think there was anyone there who wasn't. Bearing in mind that when the same question was asked of audiences 2 years ago, and the number of hands represented only about 10%, that's not bad. How prevalent virtualisation is within their data centres is another matter entirely, but the virtualisation message is undeniably filtering through to smaller companies now, as well as the large enterprises.

The most interesting thing for me, though, was their self-designed hardware device, specifically created to run XenServer. This is a 2U box that is kitted out with a motherboard you'd typically find in a mid-range system, a beefy amount of RAM (128 GB) and 16 core CPUs, but no on-board storage or disks. They include loads of free services such as installation and next business day on-site support and if, like one of their customers was, you were considering buying new hardware (from the usual well-known brands) specifically to implement a virtualised environment, you'd probably want to check this out first in my opinion. According to 360is' figures, you can save an awful lot of money.

I thought of it as a thin client for the data-centre, just with one big exception. Instead of a thin client costing about the same as a PC and not working nearly as well, this thing'll cost you less than a standard server and will actually do the job better!