Transforming the IT world

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.