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NEW YORK—Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold announced on June 27 a new version of the companys virtualization software, QuickTransit, for Solaris/SPARC applications. The new software will allow Intel-based computers running Linux to run Solaris/SPARC applications in the same memory space as Linux applications.
This makes QuickTransit different from products such as VMware, which can run several different, but separate, operating systems at the same time.
Transitive, based in Los Gatos, Calif., is best known for its Rosetta software, which allows Apple Macintosh applications written for PowerPC platforms to run on the new Intel chip-based versions of the Macintosh.
Transitive is already producing a version of QuickTransit that will allow Silicon Graphics applications to run on Intel/Linux platforms. The current versions of QuickTransit are designed for use with Intel Itanium and Xeon processors.
While Wiederhold said it was too early to make an announcement, he did say the company will begin testing its software on AMDs Opteron platform in the near future.
Wiederhold also said the company was broadening its distribution model. In the past, Transitive has only sold its software to computer makers, but he said the software would now be available to users, VARs, ISVs and others.
Wiederhold made his announcements at a press conference at the C3 Expo trade show being held here the week of June 26. During an earlier discussion, Wiederhold and Intels General Manager of Server Platform Management, Lisa Graff, had described how software virtualization worked. Graff said Intel would be changing its processor architecture to make virtualization more efficient.
Wiederhold said QuickTransit runs as an application on top of an operating system. Once its loaded, he said, native applications can be loaded and run as if they were running in their native environment.
“This solves many of the problems of server migration,” Wiederman said. In the past, he said, “switching costs were so high that there was little migration.”
He also said that in many cases, the difficulty of migrating platforms wasnt due so much to technical problems as it was to management issues, or simply because development staffs were overloaded, had other priorities or simply didnt exist.
“ISV support wasnt happening,” he said. “Now we can decouple hardware and software migration.”
Wiederhold said virtualization usually works well enough that its never necessary to rewrite an application so that it runs natively in the new environment. He also said the new version of QuickTransit is available immediately, and will sell to users for $750 per socket, which he said means each CPU socket installed on the computer.