IBM to Open Cloud Lab on Wall Street to Promote KVM Adoption

Five months after opening a virtualization center in Beijing to help organizations adopt open-source virtualization technologies, IBM (News - Alert) has announced plans to open a similar center in New York City for financial services firms.

IBM is pushing for companies to adopt kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), which is virtualization software designed for Linux and Windows that can help businesses save money and avoid vendor lock-in.

The KVM Center of Excellence in New York is being designed to help clients, software engineers and business partners to utilize open-source virtualization to build cloud-computing platforms.

The worldwide virtual-machine software market was on track to grow to over $3.6 billion in 2012, up from $3 billion the year before – a 19.3-percent year-over-year growth, according to data from IDC (News - Alert). KVM is growing at 150 percent year over year in terms of unit shipments, with over 100,000 servers already using it worldwide for virtualization.

With so many financial businesses based on Wall Street, Linux is becoming widely adopted by financial exchanges, which are poised to pave the way for growth in KVM adoption, according to Jean Staten, director of cross-Linux strategy at IBM.

“Wall Street is at the forefront of the adoption of Linux, and financial clients are now leading the way on adopting KVM in order to build a flexible computing infrastructure to meet business demands,” Staten said in a statement. “As the industry evolves to meet new demands from customers and regulators, these enterprises will need expertise on how to build open standards-based clouds.”

The new IBM KVM Center of Excellence in New York will offer technical training and hands-on experience building enterprise KVM solutions. Resources will also be available to help line-of-business professionals understand the benefits KVM offers.  KVM-based solutions from IBM, Red Hat (News - Alert), SUSE and other IBM Business Partners will also be showcased at the Center, company officials said.

The KVM Center of Excellence is part of the IBM Wall Street Center of Excellence, which focuses on low latency and high-performance technologies for financial markets clients. 

IBM’s Beijing KVM Center of Excellence is colocated with the China Systems Center to make it easy for clients and partners to meet the experts, have access to briefings, provide staff training, and conduct proofs of concept of their own solutions.