Virtualisation: Features

Microsoft's release this week of Hyper-V means there's one more hypervisor in the game -- and one more reason management capabilities will play a large part in determining which vendor will win long-term customer favor by providing the tools to optimize virtual server environments.

IT professionals may initially be awestruck by the promises of virtualization, but Gartner analysts warn that awe could turn into upset when organizations start to suffer from seven nasty side effects.

HP this week at Software Universe offered details about how it plans to build out its software and services business. Here are 10 things we learned that show us HP is serious about software.

There are three huge and hugely influential organisations that vie for top spot on the IT procurement scale every year. No, they don't dig up coal, or manage funds, produce widgets or ship wheat. Their contribution to the Australian economy is vast, but difficult to measure, and with over 600,000 screens and 14,000 servers spread across the eastern half of the country, they are far and away Australia's most important buyers of ICT.

Jonathan Snyder's five-person team at Dreambuilder Investments isn't your typical IT organization. Or is it?

For the past six months, our offices have been part of the brave new world of virtualization. Not of servers, storage or networks but of the next-generation desktop. The rationale for the original decision to virtualize the desktop was to offer the staff operating-system and application flexibility while maintaining governance, manageability and control of the corporate environment.

Virtualization is a superhero among technologies, transforming static, brittle data centers into dynamic, flexible resource pools and giving IT an easy way to cut costs, improve services and expand operations beyond the limits of the physical world. With great power, however, comes great responsibility.

Cisco plans to claim its piece of the virtual data-center pie with products that automatically provision, manage and optimize virtualized environments.

We asked IT executives and industry experts to dream big and tell us about their ultimate wish lists for a brand-new, built-from-scratch data center -- if money were no object. Here's what they had to say:

About 15 miles from its medical center in downtown San Antonio, Christus Health is building a US$23 million data center to house a flood of digital information ranging from patient insurance records to CT scans.

Virtualization has gotten into many nooks and crannies of IT infrastructure, but some of the available vendor technology is half-baked, according to a recent report from Forrester Research. According to Forrester, as of Q2 2008, server and client virtualization is mature enough to pay off in the short term, but storage virtualization-particularly application storage-is "not very advanced" and doesn't yet offer much payback.