October 7, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to a recent report by CNet, hosting automation and server partitioning software maker SWsoft (SW-soft.com) is planning to expand its Virtuozzo software for use with Intel?s new high-powered Itanium chip family, along with offering its virtual environment functionality for the Windows market.
SWsoft says both the Itanium version and the Windows version of the Virtuozzo platform are expected to be released in the first half of 2003.
The company says it has an early-access agreement with Intel that allows it to test new technology, and is working to formalize a marketing agreement.
SWsoft?s existing virtualization software, especially well-suited to the operation of Web servers, is designed for use with the dominant Linux OS and Apache server combo, but introducing a product for the Windows OS and IIS server combination should open the company up to a considerably larger market.
The Itanium version has less of an obvious audience, with adoption of the relatively new processor family still moving slowly and very high-end servers uncommon in the hosting business. At the same time, the virtual environment capabilities of the Virtuozzo product could create a very worthwhile application for high-end computing in the Web hosting business.
