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SunGard on Virtualization? 'Been Doing It For Years'

I spoke with Don Norbeck out of Wayne, Pa., this morning. He's director of product development for SunGard Availability Services, though a more appropriate title might be SunGard Virtualization Guru. Or Evangelist.

Welcome to "part two of my soon to be a series" covering virtualization in large hosting centers. And yes, there might be a third.

Full disclosure -- in the bad old days I worked at a Fortune 100 that mirrored all critical systems (mainframe, Solaris, and x86) to SunGard's Thornton, Colo., center. They were a critical piece of my employer's disaster contingency planning.

SunGard has been relying on virtualization concepts as part of its disaster recovery offerings since day one. One way to look at it: Clients essentially lease a worst-case-driven mainframe "timeshare" as an insurance policy. Need a third contingency site for hosting your giant DB/2 environment? Sign on to SunGard in case you have a really bad day at your two primary sites. They'll spin you up.

SunGard's changed its product mix over the last 10 years, adding live hosting services to the tune of roughly one-third of its revenue on top of disaster recovery clients. Recent acquisitions of Inflow and VeriCenter were made to increase data center footprints, inherit talented warm bodies, and bring over additional clients. Its primary driver for acquisitions has been adding square footage, bringing its holdings to 27-plus hosting centers.

SunGard's take on virtualization? How 'bout "what's old is new again" -- Sun Containers, AIX, AS/400 have all been in-house forever. For the 23-year-olds out there, mainframes and midrange were "virtualized" long before VMware was a gleam in anyone's eye. SunGard dove into testing of ESX early last summer and began offering customer-facing VMware hosts in September. Norbeck was happy to say SunGard has achieved Gold VAC (VMware Authorized Consultant) status.

Norbeck sees x86 virtualization as the logical extension of a sound disaster recovery strategy. While most clients are seeking contingency ESX hosts for existing VMs, Norbeck says "P-to-V will be huge" in the near future as clients realize the savings and flexibility inherent in taking their in-house physical servers as a VM under SunGard's shared environment for disaster recovery planning.

While most hosting clients want their own iron, in disaster recovery situations a shared platform will do just fine, thank you. Bringing up my public transport analogy for shared hosting, Norbeck said customers will "call the bus if they need it. Or take a car share" to get to work. I guess folks aren't as picky about VM cooties when they need to get their business up and running.

While SunGard is leveraging experience with resource sharing, provisioning, and machine management, according to Norbeck the first lesson learned is that x86 platforms are not mainframes. Required downtime for upgrades/repairs, reboots for patches, and sharp performance plateaus add spice to the mix when SunGard entered ESX testing last summer.

Using SunGard as a barometer to measure large-company acceptance of open source or alternative hosting platforms doesn't bode well for the Xen and VZ vendors. Less than 1% of SunGard customers have inquired about non-VMware solutions, with an even smaller number of disaster recovery clients asking about 'alternate' virtualization host platforms. Everyone wants ESX.

SunGard brings in roughly $300 million on hosting revenue, which makes up about 30% of the company's annual take. It likes virtualization. It likes shared platforms. You should, too.

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