Virtualisation and Multi-core chips: Open source gains as commercial vendors take profit

Virtualisation and multi-core chips are two pieces of technology that are changing the way large computer centres work. Virtualisation is a idea of inserting a layer of middle-ware between an application and the underlying system to enable the application to run anywhere you want it to run, or even in several places at once. This enables applications to be moved from server to server to cope with downtime, and be replicated across multiple machines for times of peak usage (end-of-the month reporting, Monday morning peeks in email, enrolment week, etc) without tying up extra dedicated machines 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Multi-core chips are single pieces of silicon with two (or more) CPUs on them. Sharing much of the low-level infra-structure means you can pack more of them into a smaller space and they work together faster than they would on separate chips.

Taken together virtualisation and multi-core chips have made it significantly harder to answer the question "how many computers are you running this application on?" which has traditionally been the sole factor in pricing of software for such data centre mainstays products as databases, email and web servers. Commercial software vendors have been charging for data centres for as many computers, CPUs or cores as they might conceivable use in a case of extreme demand, when they're using considerably less that this most of the time and using the narrowest possible definition of the word "computer".

Such a pricing model is an open invitation to open source companies and groups, who've long moved away from traditional business models and pricing models because they can't charge for the software. Charging for installation, customisation, support and training rather than the actual software not only avoids quibbles about what a computer is, it leads to a business model in which clients can see up front where their money is going. Clients seeing exactly where their money is going is, of course, only good for those organisations using it responsibly.

So which open source software vendors are gaining from this trend? The big database players to start with: MySQL, Postgres and SleepyCat (each with a different business model) which are eating into the lower end and particular niches of database giants Oracle and IBM.