Transforming the IT world

Virtualisation technology has changed so many aspects of general computing – from software vendors to standard OEMs. Each segment of the industry has had to accommodate the changes that virtualisation has brought to bear. Virtualisation has become a truly disruptive technology that has changed the way we do business. The impact of virtualisation on the way organisations have managed the IT infrastructure has been far reaching. From managing and increasing uptime to changing the way a company implements a disaster recovery strategy; virtualisation has fundamentally changed
best business practices.

For example, in most cases, the cost of acquiring another company can include significant portions of IT infrastructure- related costs. Companies that are already virtualised now have the option to fast-track integration as part of the negotiations with the company being acquired through a virtualisation first policy. This allows for disparate infrastructures to be seamlessly integrated into their own processes at a reduced cost of ownership.

Virtualisation has fundamentally changed and will continue to evolve in areas including true capacity on demand. For example, in the plug-and-play data centres, adding capacity will be far simpler and easier than it is with fixed rigid physical servers (with apps and OSs and hardware locked to those servers) than it is today. The plug-and-play data centre will be a world where scaling is as easy as plugging in and powering on the server and having the server boot directly into a hypervisor. Thus allowing automation to take over and manage this new compute capacity by migrating virtual machines to optimal load balancing is something virtualisation has provided to the x86 industry – true capacity on demand.

Virtualisation has highlighted on numerous occasions the diminishing importance of the operating system for business delivery. Technologies exist today within virtualisation vendors which allow customers for the first time to deploy an application that meets their needs versus the operating system vendor. This would not be possible without virtualisation as the customers would still be tied to the operating system/hardware infrastructure which has dominated the landscape for the past 20-plus years. The long-term view is quite clear – virtualisation is moving the software vendor industry to be responsive to their customers regardless of the platform and providing a cloud-like service to be accessed anywhere, anytime running on any platform.

The current field of software vendors are using virtualisation to make them more competitive. Virtualisation helps software vendors reduce overall development costs and improve the quality of the product to their customers. The traditional method of development on a completely physical infrastructure does not allow for this to be accomplished. As more and more software vendors embrace virtualisation, you will see more of this type of technology becoming the norm. Companies such as VMware will also provide automation and application virtualisation to the marketplace, to fit into current frameworks such as Gartner-defined “Run-Book-Automation” definitions and true “cloud-computing” capabilities.
Virtualisation delivers higher levels of services to the marketplace around disaster recovery. Zero-downtime processes have made live migration a ‘must-have’ technology for any virtualisation vendor. VMware’s VMotion has defined the very basic level of business continuity that customers come to expect from all virtualisation vendors. VMware’s position on providing a zero-downtime environment to enterprise customers at a fraction of the cost is also causing other vendors in the disaster recovery space to rethink their strategy on delivering value-added services that customers have come to expect from virtualisation.

The notion of providing a complete holistic secure environment without the overhead of installing individual agents inside the OS has disrupted the standard software vendor delivery mechanism. Imagine a data centre that is protected from viruses, intrusions and other malformed events simply because it is a virtual environment. A software vendor who delivers these types of solutions now only needs to program one operating system, says Linux – and make their solution a virtual appliance. The software costs would decrease dramatically and they would deliver a robust product to the customer.

Virtualisation in the marketplace has created the need to define workable standards that allow all vendors to participate in this exciting new field and more importantly be able to openly integrate similar solutions across a broad framework. Standards such as the ones defined by DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) have allowed vendors to create next generation appliances that meet these definitions.