Demystifying Virtualisation And How To Fulfil Its Potential

20/04/10

By Andy Rigby, General Manager EMEA, Virtustream

Virtualisation is a term that is increasingly on the minds of IT departments in companies in every UK industry sector. The benefits of cost savings and increased manageability and security of resources are extremely attractive at the best of times, but especially so in the current economic climate when budgets are stretched to the breaking point. Identifying efficiencies is a key for survival. In addition, IT directors are facing increased pressure to evolve their departments from merely being cost centres to innovation and revenue drivers. Virtualisation provides the opportunity to accomplish both of these...

...critical business imperatives.

Despite the known benefits, there remains a large amount of confusion around virtualisation and cloud computing and exactly how it can help businesses. With some background on the origins of virtualisation and a clear outline of how, if properly installed and managed, it can fulfil its potential and deliver the expected Return on Investment, IT and system administrators stand to offer their organisations a significant competitive advantage.

The industry has come full circle in terms of its approach to computing. The roots of enterprise infrastructure began centralised, became decentralised in the advent of client server technologies, and is now fundamentally shifting back to a centralised computing model enabled by virtualisation.

First implemented in the 1960's by IBM as a way to split mainframe computers into separate virtual machines, virtualisation was quickly proved to be a successful tool. However, this popularity was relatively short lived, effectively dying out during the 1980's and 1990's, with the advent of inexpensive servers and desktop computing. By the end of the 90's this was beginning to change again as new trends hit with the broad adoption of Windows and the emergence of Linux. Servers became standardised and the stage was... continued on page two >

 

 

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