Virtualization: Disruptive Innovation at its Best
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, May 12, 2008

Virtualization has emerged as the hottest IT story of current times. Evolutions have hit the IT industry but this one promises to be one of the most significant evolutions in enterprise IT in recent times. From changing the entire IT architecture to revamping the way business processes are designed, virtualization's impact on enterprise IT will be profound in days to come.

Virtualization is basically the abstraction of computer resources. It decouples the physical infrastructure from the software and provides the ability to logically partition resources. Thus a single physical resource such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device can be made to function as multiple virtual resources; it can also make multiple physical resources such as storage devices or servers appear as a single virtual resource. This in effect hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users

Although there are 3 basic types or categories of virtualization, server virtualization is the key virtualization category or type that enterprises are looking at today. Server virtualization hides the physical nature of server resources, including the number and identity of individual servers, processors, and operating systems, from the software running on them.

Apart from this, there are 2 other types of virtualization techniques, viz storage virtualization and network virtualization. Storage virtualization consolidates physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear to be a single storage device; network virtualization combines computing resources in a network by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned to a particular server or device in real-time.

Saying virtualization can be handy in today's world of increasingly complex data centers and hundreds of applications would be an understatement, almost undermining the revolutionary capabilities of the concept. The resource-saving capability of virtualization has taken the fancy of most enterprises, with server consolidation becoming the new buzzword. Server utilization rates with virtualization have reached unprecedented heights of more than 80% with virtualization, which has been conclusively demonstrated by several IT majors.

Energy savings with substantially reduced number of servers has been the other benefit that has enticed enterprises into looking at implementing virtualization. Enterprises in developing countries should seriously look at adopting virtualization at the earliest to counter the energy crunch that they are currently facing.

Beyond cost savings, virtualization also has the potential to completely reorient business processes in the organization. The ability to centrally orchestrate and manage applications can provide the much needed agility that organizations need to compete effectively in today's hypercompetitive business scenario.