"We're almost to the point where we don't even have to say virtualization or describe architectures as using virtualization, because it's becoming an implied part of technology," says Chris Wolf, a Gartner Inc. analyst.
Indeed, virtualization already is well on its way to dominating the server realm and is edging onto the desktop. In no time at all, virtualization's reach will expand across the application landscape, hit the mobile arena and land in the data tier. Here's a closer look at its journey across the IT infrastructure.
To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in. Computerworld - Here, there and -- yes -- everywhere, virtualization is headed toward ubiquity. "We're almost to the point where we don't even have to say virtualization or describe architectures as using virtualization, because it's becoming an implied part of technology," says Chris Wolf, a Gartner Inc. analyst.
Indeed, virtualization already is well on its way to dominating the server realm and is edging onto the desktop. In no time at all, virtualization's reach will expand across the application landscape, hit the mobile arena and land in the data tier. Here's a closer look at its journey across the IT infrastructure.
If virtualization is headed one place in 2011, it's upstream, toward mission-critical applications, says James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.
"We're starting to get to this point where organizations stop saying, 'Well, we'll never virtualize those applications, but all these we will,' and start saying, 'Why were we never going to virtualize those?' " he says.
Arun Taneja, founder of IT analyst firm Taneja Group, agrees.
"We're close to breaking all the relevant barriers so that mission-critical applications can be brought under the virtualization umbrella," he says.
Over the past 18 months, the industry has come a long way in addressing the major pain points: I/O and storage, Taneja says.
For example, start-ups like NextIO, Virtensys and Xsigo Systems offer products capable of virtualizing, or aggregating, interconnections across high-capacity InfiniBand or Ethernet links. They help give IT managers control over I/O by enabling them to set policies designating how much I/O a particular virtual machine requires and then divvy up the remaining portion among VMs on a percentage basis.
"Essentially, these products bring [quality of service] into I/O, and they provide a huge industry-forward movement," Taneja says.
Likewise, storage virtualization products from companies such as 3Par (acquired by Hewlett-Packard in September 2010 after a bidding war with Dell), Compellent (which in December agreed to be acquired by Dell) and even NetApp work far better within a virtualized environment than do traditional storage wares, he adds. He points to "wide striping" as one technique that makes bringing mission-critical applications into the virtual environment feasible. Wide striping helps eliminate storage bottlenecks because the technology distributes the I/O loads across all disks rather than forcing IT managers to group disks and specify which applications are served by each group -- even if disks are idle elsewhere in the array.
"That's the power of virtualization, and the lesson we've learned as an industry over the last three years. When you go into a virtual server world, you can't have old-style storage," Taneja says.
Moving virtualization up the stack toward mission-critical status is also about application portability, Staten adds.
"With server virtualization, organizations can build a server image really quickly, give it its own machine, move it from machine to machine, clone it, duplicate it and so on. Now they want the same thing with applications -- they want to bare-metal build an image, bare-metal deploy, bare-metal pick it up and move it somewhere else, and bare-metal clone and life-cycle-manage it," he says.
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