MetaCluster UC, unlike virtual machine partitions that virtualize at the operating-system level, virtualizes between an operating system and an application running on that system.
Meiosys says that virtualizing at the operating-system level can place overhead of anywhere from 10% to 30% on systems, and says further that it believes the best way to ensure application uptime (thereby meeting service-level agreements for those applications) is to virtualize at the application level and then move applications (rather than whole operating systems and their application stacks) around the network as conditions dictate. By the way, MetaCluster can run inside virtual machine partitions, if that is what customers want to do.
With MetaCluster UC 3.0, Meiosys is supporting Linux applications running on 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X86 and Opteron processors. In the first quarter of this year, this software will be ported to Sun Microsystems’ Solaris 8 running on its Sparc-based servers, and later this year the software will be ported to the new Solaris 10 operating system running on either Sparc or X86 platforms.
