There was some excitement earlier this month at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco over server vendor Hitachi's claim to have made third party virtualization software unnecessary. That would be virtualization as in VMware ESX or open source Xen.

Exciting claims like this are of course what makes the IT world such an interesting place. Think of it: a piece of server hardware that carries its own hypervisor embedded directly in the machine's firmware, obviating the need to buy costly ESX or fool around with not-quite-fully-mature Xen: Virtage, as Hitachi's product is called, is said to be:

...a breakthrough embedded virtualization feature which builds virtualization right into a blade server’s hardware for the first time. It provides customers an alternative to third-party software solutions and thus enables them to decrease overhead costs while increasing manageability and performance..

Where did this technology come from? Well, Hitachi is famous for having spent decades and billions of dollars trying to compete with IBM in the mainframe market (mostly unsuccessfully, except in its home market of Japan). And we know that virtualization first arose in the mainframe world, where its development was spurred early on by the need to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of million dollar room-sized behemoths. In rather obscure fashion, Hitachi claims to have "evolved" its mainframe solution into what it calls "hypervisor-type virtualization" for 64 bit and 32 bit Intel server chips (Itanium and Xeon, dual core and quad core).

Read the entire article from InteropNews, here.