Virtualization: Picking the Right Provider

Buyers weighing virtualization provider options must give careful consideration to vendors, their wares and their ability to maintain a leading edge on developing new technologies.

As virtualization has grown to become a favored technology for more and more IT departments, the number of providers has also continued to grow, offering a myriad of options for improved integrity and cost. But the speed at which the market is evolving, services are changing, and the new deployment possibilities that are emerging can be dizzying.

Picking the right virtualization provider for your business requires consideration of many top-level factors, which we might call “macro-scale factors.” These include vendor lock-in (being stuck with one virtualization vendor indefinitely barring some very disruptive change-over), the host’s rate of innovation with that vendor, and whether the virtualization management tools the provider offers for its environment(s) fit your needs. Some choices might be viewed as more “micro-scale.”

These are often based on personal preference rather than straight functionality. Would you prefer a more hands-on approach utilizing an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) host, or a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that allows you to jump in without fretting about servers and stacks?

Picking the right provider also requires consideration of a few basic tenets, including stability, level of service, services offered, and cost. But at a time when virtualization technology is evolving at such a phenomenal rate, the most important consideration may be solution longevity, which can be difficult to gauge when many vendors’ track records are just now being established.

For the time being, the safer bet seems to be to go with a larger provider rather than a smaller one.

“The major disadvantage to a small provider is that they will go out of business due to lack of sufficient funding or get bought out by a larger company,” says Kenneth Hess, co-author of Practical Virtualization Solutions: Virtualization from the Trenches. “Security is also a significant issue for smaller providers. They often can't afford to have great security. Large providers can get bought out too, but they're usually around for the long haul. The bigger the better, usually. Large providers can afford security and have better cost models.”

Common sense suggests that mission-critical applications should utilize vendors with larger installed bases.

Maintaining longevity also requires another factor from a long-term provider: the ability to keep up with its clients’ demands and evolve in parallel with the virtualization technology they’re delivering. This requires dexterity but also significant R&D resources that larger companies are often in a better financial position to afford.

“The provider must be able to supply a lot of capacity and then a lot more on demand for changing business needs,” Hess says. “Large companies will look to other large companies for that capacity.”

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, storage solutions and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.

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