Leonard Nimoy, after years spent living in the shadow of his hit Star Trek alter ego, famously titled his first autobiography, I Am Not Spock. Fans were confused and angered by this apparent rejection of Nimoy's source of fame, even though Nimoy had merely hoped to explain the depth of his acting abilities above and beyond that single character.

After years of controversy, Nimoy ended up titling his second autobiography I Am Spock. Sometimes, it's better to accept the confusion to be part of the larger movement.

Here at Scalent Systems, we can relate to Leonard's situation.

Why? We've spent countless hours scrupulously avoiding the term "virtualization". Even though it's technically correct - virtualization refers to the separation of logical computing from the underlying physical resources - it was also confusing. What is virtualization anyway? Is Scalent a virtualization company?

Well . . . we surrender.

We admit it.

Scalent is, in fact, a provider of infrastructure virtualization software.

So why did we avoid the v-word for so long? Why did the graffiti "NON" appear in front of the v-word in our "LinuxWorld 2007 Best Virtualization Solution"?

We avoided the label for the same reason that Leonard Nimoy ran away from "Spock". We were afraid that if people looked at Scalent as a virtualization company, they would lump us together with VMware and XenSource and other companies that have perfected server virtualization.

Don't get us wrong. We have great admiration for these companies, and we work together with them as partners. In fact, some Scalent code ships in every VMware ESX server. But what we do is not what they do, and vice versa.

Again, Scalent's value-proposition is infrastructure virtualization.

What's the difference, you ask?

Well, hypervisors like VMware and Xen partition a physical machine. Installing the VMware or Xen hypervisor operating system on top of a bare metal server lets you run multiple "virtual machines" (servers) concurrently, in parallel.

Scalent's software, in contrast, enables data centers to transition between different configurations - or from dead bare metal to live connected servers - in five minutes or less, without physical intervention. Running Scalent off to the side of your data center lets you run different servers (OS + Apps; Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, or full VMware ESX or Xen) over time on the same machine, in serial (one from 9am-noon, the next from 12:05 to midnight, for example), adjusting the network and storage connectivity of the physical machine to match the server running at the time.

This isn't a radical concept. Donna Scott, an analyst at Gartner, recently gave a presentation in which she highlighted the difference between server virtualization and the rest of the virtualization space. While VMware and XenSource virtualize servers, many other companies perform valuable functions by virtualizing other aspects of the data center. 3Leaf virtualizes networks and reduce data center cabling. EMC is the leader in storage virtualization. Scalent's goal, and we think we're succeeding, is to tie these solutions together to enable customers to virtualize their entire data center.

Scalent dynamically deploys software to servers across the data center, as needed. And Scalent's ability to deploy Windows, Linux, and Solaris, as well as the VMware ESX and Xen virtualization platforms, enables companies to tie together their virtualization solutions under one umbrella. Similarly, Scalent helps companies dynamically connect their servers to virtualized storage and virtualized networks. Data center orchestration software, like OpsWare, informs companies as to what infrastructure to repurpose, and then Scalent provides the power to get the job done.

So again, we surrender. There's really no way to escape the virtualization label - it's what we do. Fortunately the world now realizes that virtualization is something that applies to more than just individual servers. Scalent's value proposition is that we enable companies to manage their entire infrastructure virtualization environment, from servers to network to storage, so that data centers can be faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

So if you're a big user of server virtualization (or tried it and couldn't use it on SPARC, or because of network or storage constraints), come chat. It's time. We are a virtualization company. We are Spock.

David Silver, Marketing Manager