Troy Foo, manager of networking vendor Brocade’s Windows engineering team, “the world wants to think everything runs good on one product, but in reality that’s not the case”. That certainly seems to be the attitude that Brocade as adopted by using as many different platforms as necessary to get the job done.
Many in the industry see the battle of virtual platforms coming down to a slug-fest between Microsoft and VMware. Troy and others at Brocade see things differently, and take the attitude that there is room for not simply one or two platforms in the cloud computing marking, but as many as consumers will bear, based on the features and costs that they want.
For Brocade, there is no rush to use only Microsoft or only VMware products, as both serve a function in the industry.
Hyper-V, despite its licensing fees for Windows server and System Center, comes out to be over $20,000 cheaper per physical host, thanks to Windows allowing an unlimited amount of VMs.
VMware’s vCenter and vSphere, meanwhile, cost more right out of the gate but are better suited to run Unix workloads, and those who use Unix prefer to see VMware products being used.
Having the best hypervisor for the best fit is the model that Brocade is trying to live by, and it’s something that is so far paying off for the company. VMware supports a greater range of OS options, but the Microsoft offering has been steadily increasing in quality over the years, pulling Hyper-V almost even with its counterpart.
While the platform makers slug it out, Brocade plans to keep doing what works for it and its customers – running the platform that is the best fit.
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