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An Interview With Simon Crosby, CTO Of XenSource

Posted by Andrew Conry Murray
October 09, 2007

Tags: Simon Crosby, Symantec, VMWare, XenSource, storage, virtual, Content Management, Data Center Infrastructure, Data Management and Storage, Data Networking & Management, Hardware and Infrastructure, Infrastructure, SAN/NAS SOLUTIONS , Servers & Storage, Storage, Storage Networking & Management, Storage virtualization, Virtualization, XenEnterprise

Channel: Storage & Mgmt, Networking & Mgmt, Servers & Storage, Virtualization, Content Management

What is XenSource's strategy for competing with VMware?

VMware is ahead of all of us. But XenSource has unique gearing ratios to catch up. Xen is a community product so we get the benefit of that development ability, a rate of feature set development.

VMware will tell you we are behind them in terms of the infrastructure around VMware. Our architecture and approach are different. VMware wants to buy, own, or build anything around virtualization, from backup to HA [high availability]. XenSource has a rich, open approach to the eco-system, and we work with the best vendors in every category.

Symantec signed an OEM deal with us, not them. Symantec Storage Management will be in update one of XenEnterprise. Symantec does backup for VMware, but the full power that Symantec has built is part of our product, and requires no new license for our product. If the customer uses Symantec today, they just plug into the APIs and use it. That's powerful.

Microsoft's forthcoming hypervisor, code-named Viridian, will include components from XenSource, making you partners and competitors. What's that relationship like?

If Microsoft will have a hope of being the platform of choice for virtualization, they will have to deal with different guest types. We deliver the enablements to let Linux to run as a first-class enlightened guest OS on top of the Viridian hypervisor. It will only be credible if it can virtualize things other than Windows.

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