Virtualization, while not a new trend, is an important IT trend for 2011. It will continue to transform IT infrastructures, impacting servers, storage, desktop, and applications in 2011.
Virtualization is one of the best ways to get more business value from an IT infrastructure. Virtualized infrastructures are popular not only for cost savings, but because they can enable quick changes to business models, operating structures and the way that business processes are enabled. By decoupling logical resources from physical assets, virtualization can empower an exceptionally swift response to changing business conditions or changing business strategies. In addition, a highly virtualized infrastructure is a prerequisite for private clouds (See Cloud Computing In 2011: Private Clouds Are An Important Trend) so CIOs will continue to focus on virtualization.
Adoption Drivers:
- Desire to reduce IT operational costs,
- Desire to move towards cloud model.
- Networks and servers are better equipped to handle this technology.
Inhibitors to Adoption:
- New roles & responsibilities,
- Security of virtualized environment,
- Requires more sophisticated virtualization Management and Utilization techniques
Implications:
- IT Departments must understand their environment completely and this requires good communications between IT and Business Leaders
- Security becomes more complex in a virtualized environment. It become more difficult to manage and make sure every asset is utilized efficiently.
- Enterprises should thoroughly evaluate how business processes, administrative rights, capacity planning, performance monitoring tools and security strategies will need to change.
Analyst Quotes
“The next "big thing" will be automating the composition and management of the virtualized resources”. - Gartner (Link)
“Server virtualization is the 'killer app' for the datacenter and has forever changed IT operations” - IDC (Link)
“Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge.” - Gartner (Link)
For More Information
- BusinessWeek: Virtualization Solutions and Virtual Servers
- CIO.com Virtualization
- Forrester: Virtualization (search)
- Gartner: Virtualization
- IBM: Virtualization Solutions and Virtualization overview (video)
- IDC: Virtualization
- InfoTech: Server & Storage Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization
- InfoWorld: Virtualization
- Wikipedia: Virtualization
Over the last 3-4 years we’ve seen server virtualization really take off as a trend and now it is almost standard technology in the data center. While security concerns remain a hurdle to deployment, we’ll continue to see a focus on virtualization across the entire infrastructure in 2011.
Virtualization terms everyone needs to know
Posted by: mark | February 24, 2011 at 05:35 AM