A vision of the future
By Leslie Faughnan
From its lofty perspective as a virtualisation pioneer and clear market leader, VMware said that the technology was not only mainstream, but now the computing architecture of choice.” It is fair to say that every significant enterprise globally has either implemented virtualisation in its technology stack or has embarked on some practical steps in that direction,” said Matt Piercy, VMware regional director for Northern Europe.
In many respects, the challenges today are to go beyond the initial phases of server and data storage consolidation, and develop the many other business benefits of virtualisation and related technologies. Business continuity has proven to be such a major area and one of the marketplace’s major drivers.
“The traditional solutions of expensive server clustering and duplicating hardware in hot sites have been replaced by software systems,” Piercy said, leading to more effective and economical results.
The security benefits of a virtualised environment were also significant, he said.” When applications and data are on virtual machines in a data centre, al l potential threats from outside can be blocked at the virtualisation layer. The security protection is effectively at the core, rather than the perimeter.”
The benefits are broadly the same across the board:
greater ease of management, effectiveness and lower costs. Al lied to those are flexibility and speed of change in al l resources, from data to operating systems to applications.
“There is no single workload that cannot be virtualised, from small scale to global. For example, you could run the entire global real-time payment processing for Visa,” said Piercy.
Conceding there were still some niche software vendors which were not fully on board – to the extent that they were reluctant to support their applications in a virtualised environment – Piercy said that all of them had plans to do so.” We believe that over 90 per cent of al l commercial applications are now running on VMware platforms.”
The next wave in the virtualisation tide was the virtualised desktop, he said. “We are seeing massive interest and accelerating roll-out. In VMware View we can deliver rich, personalised, virtual desktops to any device with al l the benefits of centralised enterprise desktop management.”
The VMware View portfolio of products means that virtual desktops actually run in the data centre, while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalised way on any device.” We can link to a laptop, netbook or iPhone,” Piercy said.” Our vision is of PC-over-IP based solely on software.”
In many ways, the salient point about virtualisation today is that it is an evolution – both from a technological point of view, and considering the possibilities virtualised computing are developing.
