Fabric7 promises high-end servers at low cost - An array of inexpensive Opteron processors plus commodity virtualization underlie the new, muscular server architecture developed by Fabric7's innovative engineering team.(Fabric7 Systems Inc.)

Server virtualization technologies are getting monstrous amounts of buzz because they encourage cost savings, permit greater deployment flexibility, and increase utilization rates. Today, most virtualization technologies focus on software implementations, but a fledgling server vendor called Fabric7 is taking a different, hardware-based approach.

According to CEO Sharad Mehrotra, the performance of Fabric7 servers is competitive with proprietary, often pricey midrange RISC/Unix servers from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems -- at about a quarter of the cost.

Fabric7's servers center on eight single- or dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs and as …