In this first part of our lengthy video interview with Nick Van Der Zweep, Director for virtualization at HP, we get introduced to how HP defines Virtualization as flowing computing resources around and how this drops your costs and increases agility from desktop virtualization to data center virtualization and storage.

Our interview by Toon Vanagt was recorded at the HP headquarters in Cupertino, where Nick Van Der Zweep is often asked by financial analysts: ‘Is Virtualization bad for your business?”. His clear answer is “NO”, as it unlocks the potential for businesses to do more and enables HP to sell a lot more robust configurations with a larger amount of condensed CPUs, much more memory, more I/O capability, etc…

Nick also shines his light on the future of Virtualization, which will have (mostly free) hypervisors as a commodity. What really unlocks virtualization however is the management software and related automation capabilities. This is why HP bought and integrated a company like Opsware.

Apart from its top-range Integrity platform, with the HP-UX operating system, (deeply virtualized since 1999) HP is absolutely not entering the X86-market with a proprietary hypervisor. With products like Inside Dynamics, HP reaches into third party hypervisor software and manipulates those virtualization layers agnostically for multiple vendors. Nick is very happy with the excellent responsiveness from the X86 virtualization leaders and claims HP is the number one partner for VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.