Virtualisation: Features

If you're not doing virtualisation you're either thinking about it, planning to do it, piloting it or at least reading about it. If you're not, well you're not really into IT. For the last few years the technology has been searing its way into the minds of decision makers and spreading its virtual tentacles into assorted elements of the IT architecture.

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.

The coach and fans would be happy; the Australian server market was kicking goals in 2007 and put its biggest ever score on the board.