Stan Beer
Wednesday, 16 July 2008 16:34
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 3
Large commercial operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, will no longer exist within five to ten years, according to a senior VMware executive. Instead there will only be very thin open source operating systems supporting virtual appliances.
According to Paul Harapin, managing director for
Australia and New Zealand at VMware, Windows and other large operating
systems are already starting to be replaced by virtual appliances
running on thin layers of Linux.
"When you go to Cisco and say you want a router and a firewall, they provide you with an appliance," says Harapin.
"Inside that appliance is probably a bootstrapped Linux operating
system that they manage themselves, there's memory and all sorts of
devices. If something goes wrong with that appliance, you don't open up
the router and try to determine whether it's an OS problem or a memory
problem, you simply call Cisco and tell them that's there's a problem
with your appliance."
Paul Harapin claims that this scenario is the forerunner of what is to come in the computing environment.
"What that means is they don't need you to buy a large commercial operating system from Microsoft or anybody else," he says.
"They use their own open source OS, a very thin layer of operating
system. They take out all the unnecessary components that are in a
large commercial OS because they're customising the OS to optimise the
use of their applications. They essentially package that up as an
appliance, a running server or a running application, and they send it
to you. If you're running a VMware infrastructure, you just drop that
on and there's your server up and running.
"If there's a problem, there's no operating system that you need to
worry about because you simply call the software (application) vendor
up, tell them there's a problem with their VM, and they'll snapshot the
VM, patch it and send it back to you. So it's an appliance but it just
has no hardware around it."
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