There are many options today to run a software applications in a cloud. New virtualization techniques deliver different options on how to run SaaS efficiently. What SaaS virtualization works best for you?

Amazon EC2 running Zen virutalization has proven to be an affordable approach to cloud computing and many small to large enterprise leverage their technology. There are a few concerns today about EC2 shared CPU architecture and security holes in the Zen platform. Many cases customers would rather not share CPU cycles with different applications or surly not compete with other companies for CPU cycles.

VMWare fully supported and commercial product hosted in data centers to offer most features virtualization has to offer as well as production scenario examples how to keep SaaS applications available. Easly build virtual machies from your desktop and deploy images directly to staging and production servers.

AIX with it's built in virtualzation enables not only a smaller footprint for the virtual images that both Zen and VMWare but also includes a nice feature for micropartitioning. The technology for LPAR virtualization has not only been around for a while but has proven to be the virtualzation for large financial institutions as well as mission critical government applications as well.

Although iDataplex is not virtualization I would like to include it in this list as well has interesting features as well and is a interesting solution for solving typical scalability challenges for SaaS applications. Each MAC address is known thoughout the iDataplex cloud regardless of its growth challenges. This enables a scalability model in a true sense of "add as you grow".