Executive Viewpoint: Rob Wilson, GlassHouse Technologies

By Robert Wilson
published: Friday, December 19 2008

Virtualization Keywords for 2009: Grow, Improve and Optimize

Virtualization in 2009 is gearing up to be one of the most anticipated in years. Not since the introduction of VMware's VMotion technology has the landscape been filled with so many exciting and improved features. With the growth and maturity of server virtualization and the movement of virtualization into the desktop space, this coming year is going to be a turning point in the improvement and optimization of the virtualization industry.

Growth

With the explosion of virtualization in the datacenter over the past five years, many companies are reaping its benefits. From server consolidation to improved backup and recovery, virtualization has grown from the unknown to a must have in the IT industry.

As with every great technological breakthrough, growing pains have been experienced along the way, and virtualization has not escaped without its share of hurdles to overcome. Virtualization brought concerns over performance, availability, vendor support and a mountain of operational changes within an organization's culture. Virtual servers have become increasingly difficult to control, locate, manage and report on.

With this rapid growth and amazing benefits, it was easy to ignore or overlook deficiencies in the maturity of our operations. To most these were a small price to pay for the gains provided by moving to a virtual infrastructure. But as time moves along and virtualization has switched from supporting development and Quality Assurance environments to running more and more of a company's mission-critical applications, these deficiencies are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Improve and Optimize

In the next 12 months we expect to see a continued surge in products, features and movement in the technology that will focus on addressing these issues outlined above. Companies will be looking to not only grow their environment, but get better use out of what they already have. Optimization, improved management, application support and service level development are what we see making the majority of virtual infrastructure support projects for this year. Here are a few of the specific examples we're expecting to see in 2009:

VMware's next release of Virtual Infrastructure:

The Virtual Datacenter OS which will include improvements in networking, storage and application services. Including features like fault tolerance (VMware FT), vStorage, vCloud and Application vServices will bring us all new and exciting features to enhance our infrastructure and the services we offer our clients.

Move to Virtualize the Desktop:

With the success of server virtualization, a renewed focus will be on expanding the benefits to the desktop arena. With the emergence of new product releases from Citrix (XenDestop) and VMware (View 3.0), there will be a major influx of companies researching and experimenting with full scale desktop virtualization. One of the most exciting ideas in this area is giving a user the ability to take their virtual desktop with them on the road. Desktops that are portable and sync back to a central datacenter will help improve the management and security of the traveling or remote employee.

Improvements in the virtualization lifecycle:

End-to-end management and full integration of the infrastructure into the operation processes is becoming a key concern for companies that want to continue realizing the benefits of the environment. Organizations are now taking the time to analyze their virtual infrastructures and identifying the gaps in operation and procedures. Along with this need, we will see an influx of products and services that will be geared toward rectifying inadequacies in the billing process, capacity planning, performance monitoring and alerting, security and policy management, etc.

Vitrtualizing systems with much more stringent requirements:

Now that organizations are comfortable and familiar with their virtual environments there is a trend to add more high performance systems to the virtual datacenter.  We expect this to continue fueled by better and better performance from hardware vendor offerings.

Virtualization - The Next Phase

The evolution of virtualization has been similar to almost every technological breakthrough.  Adoption has been the first step and now that companies recognize virtualization as a sure fire way to green their data center and cut IT costs it is time for the next phase - improvement and optimization.  2009 will see more companies utilize enhanced products and services, while also looking to expand and get better use out of their virtualized environment.  But most importantly, 2009 will be the year when companies start to see their return on virtualization investments.

GlassHouse Technologies

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