‘The operating system shouldn’t matter’.
SearchServerVirtualization.com: As we move to a highly virtualized environment, how does the role of the operating system change?
Diane Greene: The operating system shouldn’t matter to the customer anymore. What matters to them is the service they’re getting and how stable [the OS] is and how well it runs. Once you put in that virtual infrastructure, the only thing that the operating system is there for is to give the application a sort of platform to run on.
[The situation] has gotten turned on its ear where the application is in charge of picking the best operating system. Historically in this industry …Microsoft has …had a complete lock on our industry, where they control the APIs to the applications, they control the APIs to all the hardware and all the hardware devices. It is their march, people go on their timing, subject to where they decide they want to go. They are a great company and they’ve done a lot of great things, but it is to their cadence. And that changes if there’s a virtualization layer there. If all this stuff is open and interoperable, people are going to be able to mix and match, and the cadence is going to be a joint thing in the industry.
