GELSINGER: No, I love them all. They each have a different virtualization model -- a hosted vs. hypervisor model -- so each has different strengths and weaknesses. When you go to corporate buyers, the VMware proprietary solution is strong there, unless they're a big Linux shop and have made in investments in IT competence and have their own OS manager, even if they're getting Red Hat support. This class of customer may be more passionate to move to Xen. If your company has a heterogeneous data center, VMware is clearly a solution.
CRN: Where do you see opportunity for Xen?
GELSINGER: No one is taking the approach to the midsize market, and that's where Xen has very interesting potential. I mentioned Novell's announcement [this week that SLES 10 Xen virtualization has been optimized for Intel VT-x].
CRN: As Intel subsumes a lot of software services like virtualization and storage into silicon, how will that impact Intel's ecosystem?
GELSINGER: There's a giant sucking sound, and the magnitude of the sucking is called Moore's Law. ISVs need to keep moving to the next wave of innovation. For example, virtualization once was all software, and now we're taking a piece of it and doing it in silicon. But does this mean virtualization software has gone away? No way, we're far from it. But some differentiation is in hardware, so now the vendors have to move to virtual machine monitors, virtual machine applications or data center-wide virtualization. You have to move forward, and any ISV that doesn't stay on the bow of the wave really suffers in that vortex of Moore's Law.
CRN: Why do whitebook builders continue to have a hard time? Any chance the climate will improve for them soon?
GELSINGER: We hope so. Part of the reason is a lack of standards. So we've done more work to standardize building blocks of the notebook -- like the battery, display and motherboard form factors -- to close the barriers to entry.
CRN: Will Intel's next-generation Centrino platform, code-named Santa Rosa, give a lift to whitebook builders?
GELSINGER: It won't be Santa Rosa. We have a mobile acceleration program. That's a structured program to address that weakness. It won't change overnight, but it will make the channel a more viable alternative to [top-tier OEM notebooks]. We launched it a year ago but in a fairly modest way.
