A Cup of Virtualization, Please!

Virtualization has become a trend when talking about storage and server business. Just like one of Murphy's laws says, the less people know about technology, the more they try to get hold of it. Virtualization is on everybody's lips, no matter if they don't have a clue about what it does.

In general terms, virtualization refers to the abstraction of computing resources, especially to splitting a single physical resource (such as a server or an operating system) into multiple logical resources.

Each logical resource acts the same as the physical one, except that it has a limited access to the host system's resources. Virtualization exists since 1960, and was used especially on Unix systems and mainframes, but, as server business got bigger, virtualization has enjoyed a great deal of attention.

Virtualization has been pushed forward on the server and storage battlefield, due to its numerous benefits: multiple users that share the same machine, yet customize their resourcing to fit their needs for instance. Yet, the most important feature of virtualized environments is energy efficiency.

"Energy efficiency is absolutely number one. Every customer wants to talk to us about what can we do to get more performance per watt. They're either consolidating data centers or they're trying to build new services but they don't want to have a linear increase in power consumption with all the new services they add", said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems CEO.

These benefits have increased its popularity, and people know that virtualization is good, but can't exactly point the finger to what it is.

"Everyone wants to talk about virtualization. You have to have some plan for virtualization even if you don't know what it is. They're very confused by virtualization. How do I do it, what does it do for me … what are the real values, how much cost does it add or subtract to my infrastructure? People are all over the place on that", continued Schwartz.