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Virtualization Leading Change in Korea’s IT Market 2008/03/17 By Yu Hyun-joon The virtualization is becoming an inevitable trend of the enterprise system in Korea. Korea’s virtualization solution market, which VMware Korea solely explored, is now welcoming new comers like Microsoft Korea and Citrix Korea. Therefore, it is expected to surpass 1% line in the market share. Particularly, the virtualization has been a representative technology for green IT as it could save power consumption even for biggest power consumer, IDC. To date, the virtualization has accounted for less than 0.5% in server market as those servers with the virtualization can stop all the application at once when they have a problem. However, with the improved technology and various solutions available, the virtualization is attracting attention from the market again. Generally, a unit of hardware runs a specific operating system and applications. However, in the virtualization technology, a unit of hardware can run several operating systems and applications so that users can improve the efficiency of server and save cost. So far, customers have not had any choice but VMware. However, more options are available as Microsoft Korea and Citrix Korea launched their products. Microsoft Korea will declare the virtualization technology business with its launch of the Windows 2008 Server, a result of its five year long development. The Windows 2008 Server will not include the virtualization solution. However, in the third quarter, it will launch the Windows Server 2008 solution which includes the virtualization solution. Ha Bong-moon, head, Server Business, Microsoft Korea, said, “The price gap between the Windows 2008 Server with the virtualization solution and the regular Windows 2008 server is only KRW 30,000. The hypervisor technology which can communicate with operating systems, hardwares and the virtualized modules will help users use the virtualization technology faster and easier.” Citrix Korea will launch Citrix XenServer, its server virtualization solution, within the second quarter. It acquired XenSource, a virtualization solution provider, in the last year. President Woo Mi-yung of Citrix Korea said, “XenServer uses a half of resource than the existing our products. Even the price is half of the existing one. We aim to attract 100 to 200 customers in manufacturing, financial and public sectors. Within this year.” Citrix Korea is expected to create a synergetic effect as it has a total solution consisting of the application virtualization, the server virtualization and the desktop virtualization.