On the heels of Dell’s announcement to double its data center revenues Wednesday, privately held Scalent brings core intellectual virtualization property to the multinational IT company – specifically, technology to do physical-to-virtual conversions, but also virtual-to-physical conversions.
“Scalent fills a gap; but more importantly, it fills a need customers have within their portfolio,” says Forrester Analyst James Staten. While other small vendors have the capability to encapsulate what’s in a virtual machine and move it back – including Novel, PlateSpin and Egenera, Scalent’s been uniquely effective at taking physically deployed workloads and recovering them in-full virtually.
Scalent’s technology also addresses a major painpoint for Oracle users, says Staten. Users that virtualize Oracle applications are not supported outside of Oracle VM. Technology like Scalent’s allows users to move data back to the physical box for support.
“A lot of Dell’s story up to this point about virtualization and workload consolidation in general has been about using other people’s technology,” says Staten. “Buying Scalent allows them to use their own technology without threatening other partnerships.”
Scalent provides a critical building block for Dell’s Virtual Integrated System, Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president, enterprise product group was quoted to say. "This acquisition will solidify an important component of our enterprise solution portfolio.”
Dell will integrate Scalent technology into its Advanced Infrastructure Manager product, according to the company release.
Staten expects to see Scalent technology deployed in at least three areas: consolidating for disaster recovery programs and the cloud; incorporation into the Dell’s virtual server technology; and available to users for one-off purposes.
Adrienne Baker is associate editor at Information Management. She can be reached at adrienne.baker@sourcemedia.com.
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