(By Info-Tech Analyst George Goodall - Printed with permission from Processor magazine www.processor.com).
As economic conditions worsen, the tech world is abuzz with two new concepts: virtualization and the cloud. Combining these two concepts is driving vendors and analysts into climaxes of utopic speculation. The whole thing sounds very 1999, but it is less 20th century dot-com than it is good old-fashioned 19th century Rockefeller-style robber baron speculation.
21st Century Technology: Virtualization
Virtualization has emerged as a technology for server consolidation. IT leaders have traditionally over-provisioned servers to account for peak loads, and this over-capacity represents wasted resources. Virtualization enables IT managers to abstract servers from hardware, giving them the ability to mount multiple virtual instances on a single physical server and to dynamically allocate resources to these virtual servers as loads increase.