Silver: MCSE Boot Camp
Mountain View Systems
www.mntview.com
Why it won: High-quality content and affordable
program options make Mountain
View Systems’ MCSE Boot Camp an excellent
choice for IT pros looking to update
their skills.
Bronze: MCSE 2003 Exam
Preparation
Transcender
www.transcender.com
Why it won: With seven exams and
specialized information on messaging and
security, Transcender’s MCSE 2003 Exam Preparation is one
of the best MCSE
training programs
currently available.
Virtualization
Winners
Gold: Parallels
Virtuozzo
Containers
Parallels
www.parallels.com
Why it won: A unique OS-level virtualization
approach makes Parallels Virtuozzo
Containers a better (and cheaper) solution
than other virtualization offerings.
Although the likes of Citrix,
VMware, and Microsoft dominate
the virtualization headlines,
that hasn’t stopped Parallels from
becoming a significant player in
the virtualization arena. Parallels
excels at looking at an existing market
from a new angle, and Parallels Virtuozzo
Containers is a perfect example of that
philosophy.
Unlike hypervisor-based products
such as VMware ESX Server and Microsoft
Hyper-V, Virtuozzo Containers takes an
OS-level virtualization approach. Running
on top of the host OS, this approach doesn’t
virtualize hardware, instead relying on the
host OS’s hardware and device drivers.
Because fewer assets are virtualized, Virtuozzo
Containers can support more virtual
environments on a system than hypervisorbased
solutions can. It might not be the
right approach for every situation, but the
performance and density of virtual environments
makes this product a compelling
choice for many businesses.
“Speed is the difference between profit
and loss in the financial business,” says
Arup Das, chief technology officer of Asset
Management Company. “We run 80,000
SQL transactions over a four-hour period
on Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, so superior
performance and the ability to handle
high I/O workloads is critical.”
Das points to the performance benefits
that this virtualization approach has over competing solutions. “We were particularly
impressed with Parallels Virtuozzo
Containers, as OS virtualization avoids
the poor performance caused by double
caching, which is associated with virtualizing
the hardware,” says Das. “With
hardware virtualization [solutions] like
VMware, each VM has to write to both
itself and the physical server, which can
really erode the efficiency being gained.
This is particularly important to us, as we
wanted to virtualize Microsoft SQL Server
and Oracle databases and needed to avoid
degradation in I/O.”
—Jeff James
See associated figure
Silver: VMware ThinApp
VMware
www.vmware.com
Why it won: Thinstall’s name changed to
VMware ThinApp in the midst of our judging,
but everything that makes this a great
application virtualization product has
remained the same. If you need an easy,
no-fuss way to virtualize applications, you
should take a close look at ThinApp.
Bronze: everRun VM
Marathon Technologies
www.marathontechnologies.com
Why it won: Do you need to protect your
virtual infrastructure from data loss and
catastrophic outages? everRun VM does
that—and more. It’s easy to use and easy
to deploy, and is bundled with top-notch
support options.