By Paul Bryce, Business Development Director, Node4
No, this is not a blog post about virtual gaming or how to make money out of the virtual world of second life, it’s about how virtualisation of servers and applications is fast becoming a reality and with increased focus on economic and environmental issues, it’s probably worth checking it out.
Top analyst Thomas Bittman from research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that in the next 3 years the installed base of virtual machines will grow tenfold and that by 2012 the majority of server workloads will be running within a virtual machine. http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2008/12/server_virtuali_2.html
So what is it and how might it help your business? VMware, the leading developer of virtualisation software, defines virtualization as essentially letting one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Today’s computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware ( http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/ ). You might be looking to consolidate servers or reduce costs of your physical infrastructure and virtualization may be the answer. But I see the real benefits of this technology being around improved business continuity (ie not losing everything when a server fails) as well as making desktop environments much easier to configure, manage and keep secure.
Here at Node4 we’re investing a lot in our virtual capability as we are well positioned to offer our customers solutions in this area. We have the Data Centre(s), we can offer high capacity connectivity and are accredited by Platespin (http://www.platespin.com/products/forge/ ) and Dell Equallogic who have specific offerings in this area (http://www.equallogic.co.uk/solutions/vmware_virtual_infrastructure.aspx ).
In addition we have just signed up to become a VMWare Authorised Hosting Partner so that we can rent the licences to you, just like we have been doing with the Microsoft ones with our SPLA agreement for many years. We’ll be adding more details to our web-site in the coming months, but if you want to know more in the meantime just contact your account manager (who should have all completed their training by now!)
If you were looking for something more on virtual reality and how it might be beneficial in business, then take a look at the video below – mind blowing stuff!
\’On-Stage\’Experience: Next Generation Cisco TelePresence
I hope you have a very happy Christmas!
