Amid all this talk of virtualization, Hitachi, which knows a thing or two about the subject, given that virtualization is a mainframe technology and, in simpler days, Hitachi was a PCM, is putting its mainframe-derived Virtage embedded virtualization firmware on its dual- and quad-core Xeon-based blade servers. A first.

It expects the widgetry to be available in Q1 although there's also an early access program afoot.

Hitachi's had the stuff on dual-core Itanium blades in the US for almost a year and now it's moving the firmware downmarket.

The move should give Hitachi users more versatility considering that the company's BladeSymphony 1000 servers use both Itanium and Xeon blades in the same chassis.

Hitachi claims the Virtage advance makes embedded virtualization available to all three tiers of the data center (edge, application and database) for the first time.

As firmware Virtage requires no separate OS layer or third-party virtualization software, which is supposed to relieve it of the performance hit suffered by software-only virtualization.

It is also supposed to have a natural performance advantage over host-emulation virtualization, leveraging Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) to optimize processor performance in the virtual environment.