SWsoft has joined the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. ( SPEC ) as part of its new working group to develop standard methods of comparing virtualization performance for data center servers. SPEC is a non-profit organization that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks to measure the performance of the newest generation of high-performance computers.

SWsoft is the maker of Virtuozzo operating system virtualization software, which allows a single Linux or Windows OS instance to be dynamically partitioned into multiple, highly-efficient virtual environments.

The company joins the current SPEC member companies committed to developing a new virtualization measurement standard, which include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware.

"As virtualization becomes a baseline technology in the data center, benchmarking of all types of virtualization technologies will be an important part of helping customers choose the right solution for their needs," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO, of SWsoft. "We are looking forward to contributing to the process, which will help further adoption of virtualization."

"SPEC welcomes SWsoft and looks forward to its active participation in the virtualization working group," says Walter Bays, SPEC president. "Virtualization is an important factor affecting IT, and the time is right for industry-standard methods of evaluating performance."

Operating system virtualization growing in the enterprise
According to a September 2006 IDC report, Virtuozzo from SWsoft grew the fastest among all virtualization technologies. In a November report, Gartner Group said that operating system virtualization will become mainstream by 2010.

The Virtuozzo architecture enables each virtual environment to scale up to the full resources of the physical server and maintain performance at levels consistent with a native server. Virtuozzo enables density of up to hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server.