XenSource XenEnterprise Achieves IBM ServerProven Status

January 12, 2007; 03:46 AM

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen™ hypervisor, today announced that their virtualization products have received IBM ServerProven™ certification. The ServerProven certification is part of IBM's PartnerWorld Program and designates XenSource products as having been enabled for IBM systems and successfully deployed in a real-world production environment. When deployed on IBM x86 systems, XenSource virtualization products deliver breakthrough price and performance that reduce data center complexity, increase manageability and resource utilization, and reduce IT infrastructure costs.

Solutions that are ServerProven represent applications that have been enabled for IBM Systems and have been verified through a customer experience to be installed and running in a customer location. To earn the IBM ServerProven certification, XenSource verified XenEnterprise can run on one or more IBM Systems in a real-world customer environment. IBM ServerProven certification is intended for IBM customers to be able to easily identify compatible, reliable solutions for their business-critical needs. XenSource products deliver bare-metal performance on a broad-range of IBM servers, including IBM BladeCenter and IBM System x, running on Windows or Linux.

"We were looking for a virtualization solution that offered high performance and was easy to use," said Chris Rogers, president of ServerCave, Inc., an Internet hosting and consulting firm based in Herndon, Virginia. "With XenEnterprise, we were quickly up and running on our IBM server. We have found it to be easy to manage and dependable."

"We're pleased XenSource has completed testing of XenEnterprise on System x products, and has officially become a member of the IBM ServerProven program," said Jim Northington, VP of High Performance System x Solutions for IBM. "XenSource adds to an already comprehensive set of solutions built for the System x platform, giving users such as ServerCave confidence that they're getting a proven, dependable solution right out of the box. That means added value and protection for their business investment."

In December, XenSource released the XenServer™ product family which includes XenEnterprise™, the market's first enterprise-grade commercially packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows® and Linux guests. New additions include XenServer™, for Windows standard server environments, and XenExpress™, a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Available now, all three products share the same architecture, delivering bare metal performance and facilitating easy migration and upgrades.

"XenSource is pleased to receive IBM ServerProven status, and is committed to delivering products that meet the virtualization needs for users of all IBM servers," said Frank Artale, VP of Business Development at XenSource. "Our products now have a proven track record in IBM environments, and offer a virtualization solution of choice for IBM customers that is easy-to-use and interoperable with their existing datacenter infrastructure regardless of operating system."

About XenSource Products

For enterprises, IT professionals and technology enthusiasts seeking to benefit from virtualization of Windows and Linux in x86 server environments, XenSource products offer easy to use multi-OS virtualization solutions with built-in virtual machine lifecycle management, at breakthrough price and performance. The benefits from increased server utilization result in efficiency and savings on data center management and operational costs.

XenSource products offer the following key benefits:

--  Superior Bare Metal Performance: bare-metal Windows and Linux

    performance leveraging the Xen paravirtualized architecture and hardware

    virtualization capabilities of Intel® VT and AMD® V enabled processors.

--  Easy to use:  automated step-by-step installers and a comprehensive

    management toolkit combined into a single package enable customers to get

    Xen up and running fast and also quickly build and manage a virtualization

    infrastructure.

--  Open Source Model: built on the open source Xen™ Hypervisor which

    benefits from regular innovations and contributions from hundreds of top

    developers from companies including IBM, HP, Intel, AMD and many others.

    Because of the open source nature of Xen, new features are made available

    at a much faster pace than proprietary virtualization offerings or those

    within operating systems projects with multi-year development cycles.

--  Unified Architecture: with a single, lightweight unified architecture

    based on Xen, customers can confidently implement and know they will be

    able to easily move up the XenSource product ladder with a simple license

    key. Similarly, all XenSource products share a common and standard API and

    SDK, allowing developers and ISVs to write once for all XenSource products.

    The Xen architecture is extremely lightweight and ideal as an embeddable

    virtualization component for OEMs.

--  Broadest Hardware Device Support: XenSource products leverage the

    existing device drivers in the Linux kernel stack, giving our products a

    broad and tested set of hardware device drivers enabling customers to run

    within diverse hardware environments with confidence.

About Xen

The Xen™ hypervisor is the industry-standard open source infrastructure virtualization software created and maintained by the founders of XenSource, Inc., and developed collaboratively by 20 of the world's most innovative data center solution vendors. Xen allows multiple virtual server instances to run concurrently on the same physical server, with near native performance and per-virtual server performance guarantees. The technology is being adopted worldwide in enterprise datacenters to increase server utilization, support server consolidation, and reduce total cost of ownership.

About XenSource

XenSource, Inc. develops the XenServer™ product family based on the industry's highest-performance virtualization technology, the open source Xen™ Hypervisor. The product family includes XenEnterprise™, the leading enterprise-grade multi-OS platform virtualization solution, XenServer™ for high performance Windows virtualization and XenExpress™, a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Founded and run by the Xen development team, XenSource products allow enterprises to realize the TCO savings that result from server consolidation, increased utilization, and reduced complexity in the datacenter. For more information, visit http://www.xensource.com.

XenSource, Xen, XenEnterprise, XenServer and XenExpress are trademarks of XenSource, Inc. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

IBM and BladeCenter are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. For a complete list of IBM Trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.