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Monday 17 August 2009, 5:42 PM
Virtualisation surfs the plateau of productivity
The hype cycle curve goes as follows: it starts with invention, rocketing to the summit of the peak of inflated expectations, plunges into the trough of disillusionment, climbs up the slope of enlightenment and finally levels out on the plateau of productivity. Virtualisation has, I would argue, started to clamber onto that final plateau.
Reports are now emerging on a regular basis suggesting that, from being all the rage on paper, virtualisation is now starting to pay dividends. Data centre managers are putting what started as pilot projects into full production, and are seeing real savings from the ability to stuff a number of VMs into a handful of powerful servers, replacing huge numbers of individual servers and a lot of hardware maintenance fees.
Naturally, in their wake come the vendors of VM management products - you still have to manage the applications, of course, just as you did before when they were tied to discrete lumps of hardware.
And now there's a lot of talk about orchestrated data centres, where the data centre is the unit of management, and the VMs sort themselves out, depending on where the resources are that they require.
This, I submit, is so much hot air. But it will come...it will have to, or the management load will be outrageous. Watch with interest as this technology climbs the peak of inflated expectations...
PreviousComments on this post
I think virtualisation is racing along the plateau of productivity, well on the way to the ‘Peak of Normality’ and even the ‘Shrine of Business Benefit’. Gartner itself classes server virtualisation not as a ‘moderate’ or ‘high’ benefit but as a ‘transformational’ business benefit. So much so, that our customers are already saying "What next?". Putting the journey towards the cloud to one side, what comes next might be a more dynamic infrastructure, one where virtual machines do move around and servers power themselves down in response to varying workloads. You are right in stating that management is an important part of this journey, and one which cannot be overlooked.
The refinement phase's have yet to come but sure enough they will, things will defiantly become more dynamic and for both the providers and the end user's, they may even reach the pivotal point of true cyberspace real time branching on world wide scale, that could ultimately become the new single format standard of the world of computers.
Which is nice.. no more bickering huh :)
