Zeus Technology: Virtualize Everything?

You’ve undoubtedly heard the conventional wisdom that virtualization impacts just about everything in the kingdom of IT. I’ll have to say, based on the long list of vendors we have been talking to in the last several months, that this certainly seems to be the case. A lot of mainstream IT vendors have adapted their marketing strategies to the virtualization market and are selling into virtualized environments.

Zeus Technology is one of them. The company’s core product area is an application delivery controller called ZXTM that also incorporates load balancing capability. Customers include BT, China Telecom, and NASA. The product is available as software, hardware appliances, or as a virtual appliance for VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 offering.

The company’s pitch is that since their product is software, it can replace hardware -based systems from companies such as F5 and Citrix, reside on the virtualized Web server (their target market), and offer a more cost effective approach to scaling up. The company’s marketing pitch is “virtualize everything” meaning all of the ancillary hardware that supports server or desktop virtualization.

Some of this is pure market positioning but there’s also some substance because virtualization is also about the shift from hardware to software and services and this is how data centers will over the course of time become more agile. The company is a certified VMware virtual appliance partner but says it has plans to support Hyper-V. It will also be offering an OVF compliant version as the standard progresses.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/02/2008 at 12:49 PM