This is interesting. When Sun Microsystems doubles the speed of its computers, customers don’t buy half as many, they tend to buy twice as many, according to CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
The blogging CEO says virtualization is good for the technology industry - despite the popular belief that it the consolidation benefits of virtualization cut into hardware sales.
That’s why Sun is offering the newly bundled virtualization features in Solaris 10 - from Xen to ZFS, Crossbow to Java. Solaris 10’s virtualization enables customers to consolidate the sprawling Linux, Solaris and Windows boxes laying around their datacenters, without having to pay crazy software licenses for add-on products.
“We built virtualization in to Solaris 10 not to encourage fewer computer or storage purchases, but instead, more - systems that are twice as utilized are twice as affordable,” Schwartz writes in his blog, adding that when you double the mileage of a car, more people can afford it.

When you use Solaris to consolidate lots of small, poorly utilized computers, into a smaller number of bigger computers, you may depress unit volumes, but you bulk up the configurations of the systems you sell — more memory, more cores and threads, more storage, etc., Schwartz said.

That’s great for Sun, but probably a bit disheartening for those data center managers who thought they were finally getting ahead of the game by virtualizing their data centers. Vendors are still a step ahead in line at the bank…