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Heralded as a solution to enterprise IT’s most pressing pain points, virtualisation promises new agility and return on investment to an industry with a seemingly unlimited appetite for the next big thing.
Most virtualisation projects, unsurprisingly, have focused on the datacentre, given the spiralling cost of server and storage hardware and mounting calls for reduced energy consumption.
Next will be desktop (or VDI) virtualisation, coupled with the virtualisation of applications themselves. Most organisations are still quite early in the VDI cycle, but a lot more are expected to reach that point in the next two years.
Early movers – such as VMware, which released its first product in 1999 – have been joined by a host of rivals, from tiny start-ups to the biggest names in software.
Central to the industry hype around virtualisation has been the promise of large cost savings. Yet many companies have unrealistic expectations about the capital costs involved and how quickly ROI will be delivered.
Major virtualisation projects can require enormous up-front investment. So significant are the sums involved that ROI timescales of five years are not unrealistic.
It would not be disingenuous to suggest that virtualisation should not be considered a cost-saving measure at all.
Instead, it can be argued that the real benefit of virtualisation is the enormous degree of agility it adds to previously rigid enterprise IT infrastructure.
That said, a solution can only be claimed as truly agile when it does not require customers to be tied into a particular infrastructure such as Microsoft or Citrix.
Here in particular, products such as Quest Software’s Vizioncore and Provision Networks offerings, which are compatible with multiple platforms, are well-positioned to deliver the agility demanded by enterprise organisations.
Certain analysts have claimed that virtualisation’s advantages have already become commoditised and that the real debate will centre on the battle between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ operating systems. Watch this space.
In conclusion, then: virtualisation technology, while it can and will deliver benefits to enterprise customers, has been subject to levels of vendor hype not witnessed since the untimely demise of the millennium bug.
Ian Simpson is chief virtualisation architect for the EMEA region at Quest Software
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