virtual machines

Dell shipping Egenera PAN Manager on PowerEdge servers - finally

Dell announced today it has officially begun shipping Egenera’s Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager software on its PowerEdge servers sold in North America, nine months after originally announcing it would do so.

When Dell first reported it planned to ship Malboro, Mass.-based Egenera’s PAN Manager software, it was slated for availability by June. Dell did not respond to questions regarding the delay by the time of this posting.

But, now that it is shipping, PAN Manager software will extend beyond the hypervisor and virtualizes I/O infrastructure on Dell PowerEdge servers, including Ethernet network interface cards, Fibre Channel, host bus adapters (HBAs), and Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches.

By virtualizing I/O, PAN Manager essentially creates an entire virtual datacenter where nothing is tied to physical hardware, applications or operating systems. This allows IT to allocate compute, storage, and network resources wherever and whenever necessary. The software also manages both physical and virtual resources under one pane of glass. A demo of how it works is available here, on Egenera’s website.

With PAN Manager software, Dell will have a strength against competitors with virtualization management tools, such as Hewlett Packard Co. and its Virtual Connect software, which pools and abstracts the local area network and storage area network (SAN) connections to servers and virtual machines (VMs) in HP’s BladeSystems.

When Dell first announced its partnership with Egenera, Ideas International analyst Jim Burton posted a blog stating, “In today’s market, Dell can compete very effectively with other vendors on simple server virtualization and SANs. But what it lacks is a management tool that can pull everything together into an entirely virtualized datacenter. That is where PAN Manager comes into play. With PAN Manager, Dell leaps over many of its competitors with the ability to create the virtualized datacenter of the future today using inexpensive industry-standard components…We at IDEAS feel the OEM relationship is a win-win for Dell and Egenera, as well as the customers of both companies”

Unlike other software that Dell resells, PAN Manager is integrated with the Dell hardware in the factory. “That means the customer doesn’t have to worry about installing software, and all the pieces work together correctly with multiple vendors. Dell also provides any professional services and offers first line support on Dell / PAN Systems,” said Christine Crandell, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Egenera.

PAN software existed only on Egenera’s BladeFrame products until November 2007, when the company opened it up to third-party hardware. Fujitsu Siemens Computers was the first official OEM, and Egenera PAN Manager is now integrate into its Primergy server line as well.

Server sales suffer on economy, virtualization; vendors branching out

With the U.S. economy in a recession, world economies suffering and virtualization adoption on the rise, it comes as no surprise that factory revenue in the x86 worldwide server market declined 5.2% year over year to $12.6 billion in the third quarter of 2008 (3Q08), according to the IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker released December 3.

In fact, this is the largest quarterly revenue decline for servers since the fourth quarter of 2002, and the sluggish server unit shipment growth of 2.8% year over year in 3Q08 represented the slowest increase in server shipments since 4Q06, the IDC reported.

“The x86 server segment was definitely impacted by the economic downturn; there was significant deceleration in the quarter with a particular weakness in September,” said Jed Scaramella, IDC Senior Research Analyst, Servers. “Due to the uncertainty in the market, customers cut back on all nonessential spending.”

Volume systems revenue declined 7.2% year over year in the third quarter, the first decline for this market segment in more than 14 quarters, and revenue for mid-range enterprise servers declined 9.5% year over year. Shipment growth also slowed significantly for x86 servers to 4.0% (1.97 million units) because of a low demand, and revenue declined 6.6% year over year in 3Q08, representing the largest year-over-year decline for the segment in more than 24 quarters, IDC reported.

The IDC didn’t mention this in their release today, but it is obvious that virtualization is partly to blame the slowing demand for commodity x86 servers because it increases server utilization.  According to Tom Bittman, VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner, virtualization has penetrated 12% of the market, and the number of VMs deployed doubles every year. “By 2012, we expect more than half x86 workloads will be run on VMs,” Bittman said in an interview about his presentation on the virtualization market for Gartner’s 27th annual Data Center Conference this week.

“Virtualization and cloud computing have screwed up the market; vendors used to compete in compute islands, they were all direct competitors, but now they fight for control of an entire virtual layer. IBM and HP are competing in broad server technologies, instead of HP and IBM competing only in the area of server hardware,” Bittman said. “All vendors worry about becoming commodities and they all want to be considered the brains of the industry”

Perhaps that concern, along with slow server sales, is why vendors including HP, Dell and Sun have branched out into the area of data center services this year that could add a revenue stream beyond selling hardware. HP acquired EYP Mission Critical Facilities about a year ago and began offering data center services in March. Just this week, Dell announced it would offer services to help people extend the life of their data centers. Before that, Sun announced data center services that include data wiping.

But, there were exceptions to the grim server market numbers; revenue for high-end enterprise servers grew 4.0% year over year, the third consecutive quarter of growth for the segment. Other exceptions to the slowdown were blade servers (11% of the market) and IBM System z (9.4% of the market), which both increased this quarter, IDC reported.

Scaramella said IBM System Z sales didn’t suffer because they tend to be cyclical and are built into companies long-term budgets, which is not always the case for the smaller x86 systems. “Customer are more likely to push out [x86] purchases and see what they can do without,” he said.

And blades were the only platform to experience positive growth in the quarter, with all major vendors exhibiting double-digit growth in blade volumes, IDC reported.

I’m no analyst, but I am guessing the demand for blades didn’t slow down along with other x86 servers because today’s blades are pitched as ideal virtualization platforms. The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade, for instance, is one of many new blades designed with more memory, data storage and network connections to meet the needs of memory and I/O-hungry VMs.

In addition to their appeal as a virtualization platform, blade servers are desirable because they take up very little space in cramped data centers and many blade surpass rack servers in power and efficiency.

So, it will be interesting to see whether server sales recover when the world economies improve, or if they remain depressed due to the increasing use of virtualization.

The IDC is predicting this slowdown to continue throughout most of 2009, but server sales will rebound with the economy, Scaramella said. “We are not anticipating a quick rebound [but] I do not think we will see the same extreme fall-off the market experienced after the dot.com bust,” he said. “At that time there was a tremendous amount of excess capacity built out in the infrastructure. Over the past few years, many companies have been in a consolidation mode - reducing the numbers of servers they have in operations as well as reducing the number of data centers they have in operations. Back in 2001-2002, companies were able to put off purchase due to the excess capacity, this is not the case today.”

HP’s energy efficiency crusade to control server, data center power

A few Hewlett Packard (HP) executives visited with me yesterday to discuss their Green data center mission - and surprisingly, they admit that it doesn’t always mean using HP hardware.

They started off our meeting with a discussion about new and existing server power control tools, which I’m not convinced many IT admins actually take advantage of.

HP’s new Dynamic Power Capping tool within Insight Power Manager lets IT set power caps on HP servers based on peak load trends to prevent over-provisioning of power. The cap can be set on single servers or on an entire chassis of blade servers, and can also be based on user-defined policies, according to HP’s VP of Enterprise Server and Storage Infrastructure Software Mark Linesch.

HP’s ProLiant servers shipped within the past few years already have the hardware for this feature baked into them, so ProLiant users need only do a firmware upgrade to add the Dynamic Power Capping feature, Linesch said.

“HP has invested a huge amount of money in green technology not just for the sake of being green. It has very practical implications that save companies significant amounts of money,” Linesch said.

Other companies offer power capping features on their servers as well, including IBM. IT can set a power cap for IBM servers and IBM BladeCenter systems via Active Energy Manager firmware, when the firmware supports capping.

These tools sound great, but I question whether or not power capping features are actually being used in data centers. I’d like to hear from users about this; power control features have existed on servers for many years, but does anyone use them? Is a tool like HP’s Dynamic Power Capping a viable option for virtualized servers?

HP’s execs also told me about their vendor-neutral data center efficiency consultancy services. Since HP’s acquisition of EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. a year ago this month, HP  has offered vendor agnostic consulting services to data centers to help them (for a fee) measure energy efficiency, without any pressure to use HP equipment, said Bill Kosik, energy and sustainability director of HP’s EYP Mission Critical Facilities group.

“That was actually part of the deal when we were acquired; we wanted to stay vendor neutral and we have been able to do that,” Kosik said.

So far, HP’s EYP group has performed consultancy work (including thermal mapping and energy analysis) for about 30 data centers that are either on the brink of a major power consumption dilemna or in a transition phase and need help planning, designing and developing their data center, Kosik said.

On November 3, HP announced new EYP services packaged in a tidy bundle, as vendors love to do, called HP Energy Efficiency Design and Analysis Services, which includes energy efficiency analysis and design services that help data centers meet compliance regulations like those from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

And of course, HP isn’t the only company offering  data center efficiency software and services to data centers these days. The list is long, which is great for consumers.

vCloud initiative: Enterprises moving to clouds

On Monday at VMWorld, a new cloud computing intiative was launched: vCloud. As James Urquhart pointed out at his blog, The Wisdom of Clouds, VMWorld is turning into a big cloud computing event.

Urquhart posits that the combination of big news signals entry into a new era for data centers:

The long and the short of it is that we have entered into a new era, in which data centers will no longer simply be collections of servers, but will actually be computing units in and of themselves–often made up of similar computing units (e.g. containers) in a sort of fractal arrangement. Virtualization is key to make this happen (though server virtualization itself is not technically absolutely necessary). So are powerful management tools, policy and workflow automation, data and compute load portability, and utility-type monitoring and metering systems.

Recently, I discussed the concept of a “hybrid” model of cloud computing with Steve Brodie, CMO of SkyTap, and Ian Knox, Director of Product Management at SkyTap. The company announced the launch of their API that allows the transfer of existing dynamic environments to the cloud. The main focus of the SkyTap API is to enhance software quality testing, and our colleagues at SearchSoftwareQuality.com discussed the implications of the announcement for that market (Virtual environments ease software development, testing) last week.

This week, SkyTap announced that they were joining the vCloud initiative, bringing their hybrid model into the mix. The company offers a different service than other cloud hosting providers, in that their API allows users to spin up their existing infrastructure into the cloud, rather than having to build applications within the cloud.

The company explained the advantages of this model in their VMWorld press release:

Using a ‘hybrid’ cloud computing model, organizations now have a way to rapidly realize the benefits of ‘cloud economics’. The hybrid approach provides a low-risk adoption path to cloud computing and can deliver outstanding ROI compared to dynamic environments that fluctuate dramatically and are expensive to administer. In a hybrid model, companies may run their production applications onsite while conducting all their development and testing in the cloud. This enables on-demand scaling of test environments as needed and eliminates the cost of underutilized hardware. This approach also allows organizations to benefit from the management and automation capabilities of a fully automated hosted virtual lab solution, leading to huge productivity increases.

Knox ran me through a quick demonstration of how the company’s Virtual Lab works, and I was pleasantly surprised with the relative ease with which a user could connect in a virtual classroom or testing environment. The virtual lab is essentially a pool or library of hosted virtualized infrastructure that allows organizations to scale up and down lab resources as needed. Sometimes I find that the cloud is confusing to the less spatially-oriented among us, but the company’s website has a great illustrative graphic that shows how it works:

The folks at SkyTap are quite optimistic, dare I say certain, that cloud computing is the future of IT.

“It’s kind of inevitable,” said Knox. “It’s going to happen. The huge capacity headache no longer has to be borne by every company out there. With companies experiencing high pain right now, solutions like this make it so easy to get going.”

Users who have taken advantage of this easy way out of the pain concur.

“The promise of cloud computing is enormous, but with most cloud services providers you need to buy into their way of doing things from the start,” said Peter Horadan, of Admit One Security. “Skytap, on the other hand, does virtualization the same way most IT teams are used to doing it. Teams can keep their same processes and skills and use Skytap Virtual Lab as an extension of their existing environment as needed.”

If you’re interested in what is going on at VMWorld, we have it covered.

Unisys updates server with six-core Intel Xeon, enhances services

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys Corp. announced its new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server using Intel Xeon six-core processors (Dunnington), which Intel also announced today; along with new business assurance services and software in the Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite.

Unisys’ new ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server is based on the new six-core Intel Xeon processor 7400 series. It has 16 sockets providing up to 96 processor cores. According to Unisys, the 7600R is designed for database and online transaction processing environments, large-scale consolidation and virtualization initiatives and business intelligence deployments with Microsoft SQL Server.

Model 7600R can support consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, six-core Xeon processor configuration – with 24 total processor cores – which Unisys claims is better than a commodity server farm of 64 dual-socket, single-core Xeon processor servers with 128 total processor cores, while using less disk and providing better response times.

The new server also supports VMware ESX Server and Microsoft Hyper-V, and supports dynamic partitioning so users can add more processor, memory and I/O resources on the fly without disrupting system operations. Unisys plans to introduce secure partitioning in the first half of 2009, which provides partitioning capabilities at the processor core level.

Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000. Unisys will exhibit the ES7000 Model 7600R at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, Sept. 15-18.

Unisys business services
Unisys also announced new Business Assurance Services that help companies evaluate the cost and benefits of disaster recovery products, reduce the time it takes to deploy the best ones and reduce operational costs by improving resource utilization.

“We are vendor-agnostic and will implement whichever technology is best for the client. It could be a Unisys product, or it could be from another vendor,” said Jody Little, vice president of solutions and services at Unisys.

The Unisys Business Assurance Services, using discovery processes and tools developed with support from Unisys partner GlassHouse Technologies, include the following:

• Unisys Disaster Recovery Architecture Service, which provides a methodology to build application and data disaster recovery capabilities.
• Unisys Backup Modernization Service, which helps clients select new technologies and services to support backup environments at both core and remote sites.
• Unisys Data Protection for Backup Service, which helps clients improve backup and restore operations for business information, reducing costs by improving utilization of assets. Unisys experts also make vendor-independent recommendations and create a prioritized action plan

Unisys has also added new management software components to its Infrastructure Management Suite, which automates and orchestrates management of a real-time IT infrastructure. More information can be found on the Unisys website.

VMmark a server vendor leapfrog game

This week I wrote a follow up story on VMware Inc.’s virtualization performance benchmarking tool, VMmark, and found it is mainly used by vendors as a way to market their servers.

Server vendors run the VMmark test under a set of guidelines and submit results to VMware for posting. It is my suspicion that vendors play leapfrog with VMmark by looking at exsiting VMmark results and only submitting their performance results when theirs are as good or better.

For instance, IBM submitted a benchmark for its 16-core System x3850 M2
running VMware ESX v3.5, which trumped the other published as of March 2008. IBM then published a press release to brag about the results, but within a few months, Dell submitted results three PowerEdge systems sporting better virtual machine (VM) performance than IBM, and Hewlett Packard (HP) beat them all out with its ProLiant DL585 G5 server results published August 5.

HP also sent out an email to press this week boasting their top 32-core results, but didn’t mention one minor detail; they are the only vendor with results in the 32-core category so far. Sure, they are number one. They are the only one.

System Administrator Bob Plankers sums this game up nicely in his blog with a post called “Why VMmark Sucks.”  Here is what Plankers had to say:

“Having a standard benchmark to measure virtual machine performance is useful. Customers will swoon over hardware vendors’ published results. Virtualization companies will complain that the benchmark is unfair. Then they’ll all get silent, start rigging the tests, scrape and cheat and skew the numbers so that their machines look the greatest, their hypervisor is the fastest. Along the way it’ll stop being about sheer performance and become performance per dollar. Then CapEx vs. OpEx. Watt per tile. Heat per VM. Who knows, except everybody will be the best at something, according to their own marketing department.”

In addition, the benchmark is a real pain to set up and run, and the ‘free’ VMmark software requires other expensive software to work. According to VMware’s website,
VMmark requires  licenses for the following software packages;

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Release 2 Enterprise Edition (32-bit)—thre 32-bit copies per tile (two for virtual machines and one for that tile’s client system), and one 64-bit copy per tile (for the Java server virtual machine)
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• SPECjbb2005 Benchmark
• SPECweb2005 Benchmark

Plankers said he won’t be wasting any time or money running VMmark. “Instead, I’ll be in meetings explaining to folks why we are maxed out at 30 VMs per server when the vendor says they’ll run 50. Or why we chose VMware over Xen, when Xen claims 100 on the same hardware. I’ll have to remember the line from the FAQ that says “that VMmark is neither a capacity planning tool nor a sizing tool.”

Which begs the question: if it isn’t for use in sizing or capacity planning, exactly what is it good for?”

VMware says the benchmark is good for users who are making hardware purchasing decisions.

“The intention [of VMmark] is that customers can look at the results and make decisions based on what they see. It isn’t just about the fastest server; it’s about making system comparisons; between blades and rackmounts or a two-core or four-core system. Someone can see how much more performance they get from upgrading to four core processors, for instance,” said Jennifer Anderson, the senior director of research and development at VMware.

This makes sense, but as Plankers said, users should beware of benchmark manipulation by vendors and know that the results do not reflect the same workloads that users will run in their own data center environments.

Virtual machines per server: A viable metric for hardware selection?

When server vendors introduce new blade servers these days, they often mention virtualization in the same breath, often touting the number of virtual machines (VMs) their hardware can support. But those numbers are hardly the result of scientific method.

For instance, San Diego, Calif.-based Verari Systems recently announced that its VMware ESX 3.5-certified VB1257 for BladeRack 2 XL supports up to twice as many VMs as competitive offerings (16). After speaking with Verari, I asked the competition — Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Dell — how many VMs their blades can hypothetically support, and was given some big numbers.

But are these server vendors asking the right question? According to Anne Skamarock, a research director at Focus Consulting, the answer is no. Although vendors boast about the number of VMs their hardware supports, “it really is a silly way to look at it,” she said.

“The number of VMs supported depends on the workload. For CPU-intensive workloads, memory will also be a significant factor in performance,” Skamarock said. ”I have spoken with customers who are running 30 VMs per 8-core system and expect to increase that to 50 VMs per system.”

Skamarock said Virtual Desktop Infrastructure adds another twist. “The rule of thumb is six to eight virtual desktops per core, but again, memory will be a big issue here depending on the OS.”

According to preliminary data from SearchDataCenter.com’s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 61% of the respondents run less than 10 VMs per server, though 33% run 10 to 25, and a mere 5% run more than 25 VMs on a server.

Vendors make big VM support claims

According to VMware Inc.’s website, server consolidation ratios commonly exceed 10 virtual machines per physical processor; so presumably, a blade server with two CPUs, like Verari’s VB1257, should be able to support at least 20 VMs.

Within HP’s ProLiant blade server line, the ProLiant BL460c/465c and BL680c/BL685c would be a good choice for a virtual server platform, primarily because they offer a large memory footprint, which means more than 16 VMs per blade in both cases, plus more network expansion and storage performance, HP spokesman Eric Krueger said.

“Keep in mind of course the number of VMs always vary – the number could be higher or lower depending on the needs the application/VM — but based on the rule of thumb … the BL460c can support up to 16 VMs and the BL680c up to 32,” Krueger said.

Sun Microsystems Inc. claims its Sun Blade servers pack two and three times that many VMs. The Sun Blade X6250, which has up to eight cores with Intel Xeon processors, 64 GB RAM, 110 Gbps I/O and 800GB of internal storage, supports 36 VMs; the Sun Blade X6450, with two or four dual-core or quad-core Intel Xeon processors and up to 96 GB of memory, can support up to 42 VMs and the Sun Blade X8450 with 16 cores per module and 128 GB Memory, supports up to 48 VMs, according to Sun.

Dell was hesitant to name a number of VMs that its PowerEdge blade servers can support, because the number is dependent on a number of factors, like workload, memory, I/O. A spokesperson did say that “Dell has blades that support up to 66 loaded VMs. This is based on VMware’s VMmark benchmark test,” a spokesperson said. “This is an area where we are doing quite a bit of work, so stay tuned.”

So I’m wondering: Are VM support numbers a consideration when buying server hardware, or is it too subjective? Let us know what you think.

Next Generation Data Center/LinuxWorld 2008: Reporter’s Notebook

I expected this year’s joint LinuxWorld/Next Generation Data Center conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco Aug. 4-7 to be full of technology vendors, high-level technical sessions, product news and interesting characters.

As you can see (at right), my expectations were exceeded.

This year’s conference is packed, with three to four keynotes each day, a large array of tech vendors and numerous technical sessions, covering storage, security, networking, applications, facility infrastructure, and virtualization.

In the five sessions I attended today, which touched on all of the above, virtualization was a predominant topic of conversation in each.

For instance, Rajiv Ramaswami, the vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems Inc., (at left), gave a keynote this afternoon, “Data Center 3.0: How the Network Is Transforming the Data Center,” and explained that, eventually, everything in the data center will be virtualized, including networks.

In another session I attended on creating an efficient, profitable data center, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute, virtualization was listed again and again as a key way to reduce data center power consumption.

Cloud computing (aka distributed computing), which goes hand in hand with virtualization, was also a popular topic in the sessions I attended, including the kickoff keynote, “Stateless Computing: Scaling at Zero Marginal Cost above Capex,” by Jeffrey Birnbaum, the managing director and chief technology architect for Merrill Lynch.

In between sessions, I took a tour of Rackable Systems’ 40-foot containerized data center (at right), Ice Cube, which was one of the most popular attractions on the large show floor.

Ice Cube is packed with up to 22,400 Intel Xeon processing cores in Rackable’s own half-depth servers, has a 36-inch central isle to access servers and uses direct current, or DC, power and self-contained uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, technology.

Ice Cube can be configured with IBM BladeCenter servers as well.

Tomorrow I’ll check out a keynote session by Oracle CIO and Senior Vice President Mark Sunday on delivering business value with next-generation data centers and more sessions on green strategies for data centers, cloud computing and virtualization.

Zimory testing data center resource trading marketplace

Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the research and development unit of Deutsche Telekom AG in Berlin, Germany, is testing a global trading platform to exchange data center resources on-demand via the Internet.

The Zimory Marketplace is basically a data center resource trading platform where users can buy and sell server resources and Virtual Machines (VMs). The company claims to be the first to introduce and operate an international trading platform to exchange data center resources.

The marketplace sounds like a great idea for data centers that experience workload surges  and need extra capacity on-demand, and data centers with underutilized servers can sell or rent their extra capacity to re-coup some power costs.

Zimory software

The Zimory software stack has three levels of operation:

• Zimory Host is the basic entity of a Zimory infrastructure. It is installed on each server which then becomes a part of a Zimory network of computing resources.
• Zimory Manager allows the user to oversee and manage an unlimited number of physical and virtual servers with Zimory Host installed and is available in a Zimory network. Zimory Manager ships with a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI).
• Zimory Marketplace is the hub of the Zimory network and collects information about all available server resources and their status.

Servers having Zimory Host or Zimory Manager installed reside behind the Firewall within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of a data center, while Zimory Marketplace is located outside of the DMZ. All three of them interact with each other via standard HTTP.

Installing and using Zimory

To create a network of Zimory-enabled servers, the data center administrator downloads and burns the freely available Zimory Live CD image to boot each of the servers which is supposed to advertise their resources within the Zimory infrastructure. The administrator could also use a network bootable live image (also freely available) from Zimory. Both approaches will automatically turn a virtual server into a Zimory-enabled server. The installation process is almost identical for Zimory Manager.

Inside of Zimory Manager, the administrator can configure the available data center resources for direct online outsourcing and trading on Zimory Marketplace, and define limites to the available resources, as well as a pricing scheme (flat fee or pay-per-use).

For instance, the administrator can specify a particular group of Zimory-enabled servers or just parts of such a server for sale to third parties on Zimory Marketplace. Another option would be to rent remaining resources of a server with, say, less than 10% utilization.

Zimory in action

Before a workload peak occurs, systems in Zimory are running fine and the additional systems for load balancing are stored as VMs in Zimory Manager.

When an expected or unexpected load peak occurs, the IT administrator clicks on to Zimory Marketplace through Zimory Manager and searches for appropriate server resources. After finding those resources, she starts the VMs for load-balancing from within Zimory Manager.

The software applications contained in the newly deployed VMs will connect to the load-balancer of the core systems and start to take over parts of the workload. After the peak is finished the system will shut down the VMs automatically.

Of course, this can also be automated. An administrator can pre-define the thresholds for when the load is to be taken over by servers on the Zimory Marketplace.

The company plans to start beta testing soon and invites interested sellers, and purchasers, of virtualised capacity to register their interest on the Zimory website.