The rapid embrace of virtualization has helped change the economics of
IT by not only lowering capital costs but also reducing operational
costs. As customers become more familiar with the technology,
virtualization is increasingly being used to solve more than just server
consolidation challenges. While the next logical step beyond server
consolidation is virtualization for client or desktop consolidation,
there are a number of hurdles that must be overcome for server-hosted
virtual desktops (vdi) to achieve its full potential.
IDC believes the next wave of adoption will be centered on mitigating
the problems and costs associated with system downtime. IDC estimates
that server downtime cost organizations roughly $140 billion worldwide
in lost worker productivity and revenue in 2007. Because virtualization
software effectively decouples the application stack from the underlying
hardware, virtual servers can be copied, backed up, replicated, and
moved like a file. Moreover, a growing number of virtualization software
providers have incorporated the ability to do live migrations. These two
capabilities provide a low cost means of quickly reallocating computing
resources without any downtime.
"By directly addressing the need for cost effective business continuity,
virtualization will alter the economics of IT a second time," said John
Humphreys, program vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platform Group.
"More importantly, mobility will be the defining feature that will move
virtualization beyond just a tool for consolidation. The embrace of
mobility will allow customers to use virtualization for business
continuity, capacity planning, and eventually as a solution in
delivering service-oriented computing."
In the capacity planning use case, users will treat multiple hosts as a
single pool of resources and virtual machine loads will be balanced
across the pool based on processor, memory, and I/O utilization levels,
as well as policies set by the user. This will enable IT architects to
plan at the resource pool level with the knowledge that any demand
spikes will be met by a fast and efficient reallocation of the available
server resources.
IDC believes that “policy based automation”
could be achieved by bringing together SOA and virtualization. In this
scenario, IT professionals would be able to shift the delivery of
infrastructure and applications over to management systems that are
linked to policies and service levels set by the business. Although
achieving this vision would require unprecedented collaboration in the
industry, if it were successful, it would be a key step from
service-oriented computing to moving IT into the “cloud”.
The IDC study, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to
Move Beyond Consolidation (Doc #211938), provides an overview of how
virtualization is being utilized within the market today as well as how
it is evolving. The report examines new use cases for virtualization and
considers how virtualization and SOA could come together to assist the
move toward the cloud computing.
Humphreys will present IDC's vision of virtualization's trajectory at
the IDC Virtualization Forum to be held May 7th at the New York Marriott
Financial Center in New York City. Featuring end user speakers, IDC
analysts and industry experts, this one day interactive Forum offers
actionable advice for managing across virtual and physical environments
and creating a unified virtual environment across server, storage, I/O
and client environments. For more information or to register for the IDC
Virtualization Forum please go to www.idc.com/virtualization-east08.
About IDC
IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications,
and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business
executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on
technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,000 IDC analysts
provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry
opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For more than
44 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients
achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the
world's leading technology media, research, and events company. You can
learn more about IDC by visiting www.idc.com.
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