What’s Next in Virtualization?
Last week was the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas. I didn’t have the luxury of attending this one this year, but the ones that I have attended in year’s past were well worth the time. This year was one I wish everyone could have attended (or maybe just been a fly on the wall), including me.
Every year analysts gather along with, what seems like every IT person in the world, to discuss the next big trends in business and IT. Looking at the agenda, this year was not going to disappoint.
In preparation for last weeks conference, Gartner released a report prior on Virtualization. According to Gartner VP and analyst Philip Dawson, if you think server virtualization and consolidation are cool, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”. Within the next four years, both server and PC virtualization will forever separate the links between both hardware and operating systems and OSs and applications – breaking the OS dominance of the market that has existed since in the mid-70s. Add to that the prospect of virtual network infrastructures and you have the ability for the first time to establish network policies based on actual needs, rather than what the technology will allow.
Although it might seem like we are well on the way to virtualized IT, I think this latest revolution is only at its earliest stages I think you’ll agree with me in the fact that until you’ve virtualized your I/O infrastructure, all you’re really doing is creating more of the same static, inflexible systems that are already humming in your racks. And few people are even talking about things like file virtualization, data virtualization and application virtualization, all of which stand to make resources even more agile and flexible.
This is not to say that virtualization will usher in a golden era of enterprise technology. Virtualization solves many of today’s current problems, but introduces a new set of its own. The biggest among them is management, according to a panel put together by Forbes. To improve ease-of-use for the user, virtualization adds a tremendous amount of complexity to the enterprise, and quite frankly, it’s not all that clear that the current generation of management systems will prove to be very effective as more virtual systems come online.
One interesting question is how all this will affect the current virtualization market leader: VMware. Brian Madden blogs that the company could have a tough time once virtualization becomes commodity software across the enterprise and competition shifts from feature sets to pricing. Now that Microsoft has woken up to the fact that virtualization stands to displace the operating system as the underlying software platform, it could be difficult for straight virtualization players to keep up.
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