Last Friday Kyle Gomboy, the CEO of Reactiongrid announced Banbury - a plug and play device for use behind firewalls, meant for educational institutes and enterprises. This competes directly with Linden Lab's similar product which is due later this year.
The ReactionGrid's launch of pre-packaged Opensim with an
optimized hardware is an important milestone for the opensim
project and for Reactiongrid alike. ReactionGrid achieved
significant cost savings by using Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization,
and was a subject of a Microsoft case study - reported by
Maxping here.
The price for the ReactionGrid device is $8950, which makes it
affordable. In addition to the HW, it contains 4-hour training
session for the administrator and 1 year free updates to the
included software. Check all the details from ReactionGrid web
site.
Kyle Gomboy, the Reactiongrid CEO said that "BanBury
represents the ultimate in ownership and security for education and
business in virtual worlds. Using our new Hyper-V Libraries allows
for plug and play grid designs as ReactionGrid and our affiliates
begin releasing them this year. Consider BanBury a Virtual World
jukebox for Hyper-V catalogs of world designs."
The included Opensim server contains 9 regions, summing up as
768x768 meter piece of virtual land. Reactiongrid promises that the
server will be able to handle over 25 simultaneous users. The
server is running in grid mode, so it should be relatively easy to
stack them to get even more virtual land mass. This also opens up
the possibility to later connect the server to a pubic grid if the
user so desires.
Linden Lab
is working on a standalone version of Second Life to make it
possible to run it at customer location, behind the private
firewall. Current alpha stage customers for the Linden Lab solution
are at least IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New
Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman. Linden Lab is
planning to go into a limited closed beta phase this summer with
general availability later this year. See the announcement
here.
In effect Reactiongrid and Linden Lab have the same target
group, which makes them competitors in that area. For customers
this is a good thing and may hasten Linden Lab to bring their
product out earlier to not lose markets.