Virtualization Strategies News, Analysis, White Papers and Case Studies on Virtualization Software and Hardware Strategies

There has been a lot said this year about cloud computing. One could say the the whole subject is “a little cloudy.” This video from rPath does a great job of explaining cloud computing in plain english. It’s only 5 minutes long and worth your time if your trying to understand the connection between cloud computing and virtulaization. It also does a great job contrasting cloud computing with Software as a Service or SaaS.

I like the analogy of SaaS being like buying a car, where Virtualization is more like leasing a car and Cloud Computing is like having a taxi at your service. If you see other useful video’s like this please comment below or send me a link. Thanks!

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, SaaS, Virtualization Video

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year. The x86 server market led the way with 60% year-over-year growth followed by the EPIC server market with 18% growth.

“Quarterly totals of x86 server virtualization licenses continue to experience healthy growth, although the growth rates have slowed over the last four quarters. The modest decline in growth rates indicates that the market is showing early signs of maturation,” said Brett Waldman, research analyst for System Software at IDC. “Based on our conversations with end users, IDC believes that the high-volume consolidation opportunities – the low hanging fruit in the x86 server virtualization market – is starting to dry up. This is, in turn, resulting in smaller deals overall.”

Read More…

Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Software

In an effort to maintain it’s leadership in storage virtualization HP has acquired LeftHand Networks a leading provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions. The deal will better enable HP to extend virtualization solutions to midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations and cost-effectively protect critical business data. Additionally, LeftHand Networks’ intelligent cloning technology can reportedly reduce the amount of disk space required for storage by up to 97 percent.

Said Bill Chambers, chief executive officer, LeftHand Networks.”The combination of LeftHand Networks’ virtualization technologies with HP’s has the power to significantly accelerate server consolidation projects by making the deployment of shared storage much easier and more cost-effective.” The good news behind this announcement is that smaller companies can get the benefit of virtualization strategies from industry leaders like HP. Likewise remote locations in major corporations can also have these benefits. Said Dave Roberson, senior vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, HP. “The acquisition of LeftHand Networks significantly expands our storage portfolio, enabling HP to deliver customers an expanded suite of storage functionality, scalable capacity and interconnect options for every budget and performance requirement. Stay tuned for more acquisition in this space as major technology vendors look to expand their suite virtualization solutions.

Posted under Storage Virtualization, Virtualization News, Virtualization Strategies

Virtualization is a technology that can benefit just about any business. Thousands of IT executive around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Here are a few of the top benefits to developing your virtualization strategy.

1) Server Consolidation and Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher sever utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and avoiding the need for one server for each application model.

2) Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.

3) Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

Growth in virtualization has increased adoption of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, with “three-quarters of organizations” believing that “server virtualization will drive adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)” in the future. This according to survey of 100 IT directors commissioned from Vanson Bourne by web hosting firm Hostway.

The study found that the lack of available virtualization technologies had held back the uptake of SaaS products. Prior to the emergence of virtualization technologies, service providers faced a number of difficulties around offering SaaS affordably and reliably as an outsourced business service. Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, SaaS, Virtualization Strategies

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.” Read More…

Posted under Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

Over the past year, virtualization has moved to a mainstream technology that is being embraced by most enterprises. The evolution is due to the potential cost savings and increased flexibility that server virtualization can provide.From a cost-savings perspective, virtualization has the potential to reduce IT spending and improve server utilization which reduces power and cooling cost. Yet what is most exciting to IT managers is the increased flexibility virtualization can enable. IT team can deploy virtual servers faster than dedicated servers which increased their ability to react to ever changing business needs.

The challenge has been that IT applications are continuously expanding. Past solutions often involved a single application on each x86 server to avoid crashes or performance problems. Given tight IT budgets, very low utilization, and the high costs associated with low server utilization, virtualization has emerged as a way of controlling costs through consolidation while increasing the flexibility of IT. Read More…

Posted under Green IT, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies