Gartner, Inc. certainly thinks so. In fact, they feel virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. Gartner research feels virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.
Virtualization is hardly a new concept; storage has already been virtualized — albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures — and networking is also virtualized,” said Philip Dawson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, as both server and PC virtualization become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT.”
According to Gartner, the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. Server virtualization is already having an impact on the server market; Gartner believes that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 percent in 2006. As a result prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualization will have a significantly larger impact, and Gartner analysts predict that more than 4 million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.
Although application virtualization is gaining considerable interest, Gartner maintains that it is machine virtualization that will have a more-long-term impact, making personal computing more manageable, flexible and secure by allowing multiple individual footprints to be defined on the same device.
Gartner is a leading research that has over 40 special report on the impact of Virtualization. The quality is very good and the pricies are reasonable. You can find these reports at http://gartner.com/it/products/research/virtualization/virtualization.jsp?ref=3_28_08LR.
Posted under Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies
This post was written by admin on October 1, 2008
