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By Bob Violino
Virtualization has been among the most talked about technologies of late, and don't be surprised if you hear a lot more about it in the coming months-from vendors as well as from other IT executives.
Although still a relatively new technology, some analysts now expect it to become a dominant data center technology within three years.
Those companies deploying virtualization, however, face a couple of challenges, which include a lack of solid support from third-parties for running software in a virtual machine environment and the need for standards, tools, and sound management practices, say analysts.
So, what's all the excitement about? Virtualization has the potential to make data center operations and capacity planning and usage a lot more efficient, as well as give organizations a level of processing and storage flexibility they've not had before.
With virtualization, physical devices such as servers and storage systems are available as "pools" of logical computing capacity. Servers can be logically divided into multiple virtual machines running a number of operating systems and applications at the same time just as if they were running on physically separate systems.
By using virtualization software, organizations can dynamically allocate server resources to any operating system or application depending on demand. That's where the increased efficiencies and flexibility come in. Organizations can optimize resource allocation and more quickly provision capacity, an important attribute for companies facing fast-changing business conditions.
A key benefit of the more efficient use of resources is cost reduction. Not only can enterprises more effectively allocate capacity to meet rising and falling demand, but they can reduce costs through server consolidation. Fewer hardware devices mean lower costs for power and cooling.
Although there's a lot of buzz about virtualization, adoption of the technology is still in the relatively early stages. Less than 15% of all servers are currently virtualized or being virtualized, says Vernon Turner, group vice president and general manager of enterprise computing at research firm IDC. That leaves plenty of opportunity for virtualization vendors such as Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and VMware, Turner says.
"Virtualization functions are just now becoming integrated into x86 processors and the leading x86 operating systems such as Linux and Windows," says Tony Iams, vice president and senior analyst, system software research at Ideas International in Rye Brook, N.Y. "As the market moves up to the latest levels of hardware and software, virtualization will gradually become a standard operational practice in IT infrastructures."
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Indeed, in a report it published in September, IT research and advisory firm Butler Group said it expects virtualization to become the dominant technology in data centers within the next two to three years.
Virtualization, however, is not without its challenges, say to the experts.
"One issue that is lingering is support from third-parties for running software in a virtual machine environment," says Iams. "At minimum, the adoption of virtualization can introduce uncertainty and/or disadvantages with regard to licensing costs. And at worst, third-parties may hesitate outright to fully support their products on a particular [virtual machine] platform.
Other key challenges revolve around managing a virtualized environment, Turner says. "Yes, the more you virtualize, the more you need standards, tools, and sound management practices," he says. "As a result of this we anticipate an increased need for virtualization services."
In a report IDC published in July 2007, the firm predicted that the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011.The majority of the services today involve supporting initial implementations of virtualization, IDC says, but over the next several years IT consulting and systems integration will become the dominant services.
Next: Tellabs, Discover Deploy Virtualization
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