Hitachi Brings Hypervisor to Xeon-Based Blades

Hitachi is making its Virtage embedded firmware virtualization feature available to Intel Xeon-based blade servers with its BladeSymphony 1000 system.

In the first quarter of 2008, Hitachi plans to ship a Xeon version of its BladeSymphony 1000 system that comes with its Virtage technology. The technology was previously only available with the company’s Itanium-based blade servers.

But Hitachi isn’t alone in talking about built-in hypervisors. Two virtualization power houses, XenSource and VMware, have both recently announced OEM embedded virtualization hypervisors of their own. However, Hitachi thinks its solution creates more of a bond between the hardware and the hypervisor than that of its competitors. With Virtage, Hitachi is loading its system into the firmware of the service processor to gain greater access to all blades in the chassis. It also allows Hitachi to extend greater control to individual server components, controlling things such as physical I/O interfaces.

The company also claims its systems should be more resistant to security attacks since the hypervisor is better protected from unauthorized access since it isn’t placed in flash memory.

And another benefit to the new BladeSymphony 1000 is that it also works with standard versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 without the need for any special drivers.

“With this announcement, we’ve completed the first iteration of Virtage, as promised. While it was imperative to release Virtage on Itanium in 2006 to make it available for databases and applications with greater computing needs, our goal was always to make it available to all customers at all three tiers,” said Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing and solutions, Hitachi Server Systems Group. “By adding Virtage on Xeon, that part of our mission is complete. That said, we will continue to innovate and provide breakthrough technology to the enterprise datacenter.”