Virtualisation: Features

New York City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is saving power and money by replacing its desktop computers with thin clients running virtualized operating systems.

Even tech companies need an IT overhaul from time to time. Case in point: Last year, a Canadian software developer (who preferred to remain nameless for the purposes of this story) called my team at Microtek to give its server room a badly needed upgrade.

Cisco, HP and others are waging an epic battle to gain control of the data center, but at the same time they are joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers.

Faced with the continued commoditization of servers, IT vendors this year will try to differentiate their offerings by moving toward more highly integrated, unified compute platforms.

There is no doubt that cloud computing is dominating today's IT conversation among C-level security executives. Whether it's due to the compelling cost saving possibilities in a tough economy, or because of perceived advantages in provisioning flexibility, auto-scaling, and on-demand computing, CSOs are probing the capabilities, costs and restrictions of the cloud. At the same time, security and compliance concerns are at the forefront of issues potentially holding large enterprises back from capitalizing on the benefits that cloud computing has to offer.

Much has been said about best practices in IT management to tide over the economic downturn. Under ever-increasing pressure, many CIOs are now looking at IT Infrastructure management as an effective means to drive business transformation. While most organizations are keen to join in, there are some strategies that may be employed to get quick wins.

A venerable New Year's tradition in the tech world entails trotting out year-old predictions by analyst shops and laughing at their off-base prognostications. But here's a surprise: The two biggest analyst firms still standing -- Gartner and IDC -- did a pretty good job a year ago forecasting the shape of IT in 2009, as did the smaller Forrester Research and 451 Group.

Forty years after it was invented, the Internet is straining under the weight of cyber attacks, multimedia content and new mobile applications.

A host of substantial problems with porting legacy apps to the cloud will keep most companies from diving in for now, say analysts reporting on weaknesses in the cloud and ISVs trying to fill in the gaps.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to moderate an HP-sponsored meeting on the subject of virtualization. Predictably, most of the discussion (attended by press and vendors including Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware) focused on cloud computing. It was a pretty lively session, but what I want to address here is an HP product portfolio called "IT Financial Management" that was discussed, along with its implications for cloud computing. As you might guess, the product focuses on financial analysis of IT operations, which is extremely relevant to the adoption of cloud computing.