NetEvents: Virtualisation heads for mainstream

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Virtualisation is on the road to becoming a mainstream computing technology, delegates at the NetEvents conference in Evian, France were told.

Camille Mendler, vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group, said that enterprises shouldn't rule out the use of the technology in the infrastructure over concerns that it would be "too complex". But she added that the terminology surrounding virtualisation is holding back its uptake.

She rounded on the term "hypervisor", which she said was "ridiculous". "It's basically virtualisation management software. But this kind of language makes it hard for IT managers to get the boardroom on their side for these projects. Virtualisation as a term gets used in all sorts of ways and sometimes in ways that aren't helpful," she said.

Mendler said that recent survey found that enterprises are now making significant investments in virtualisation and most interest in the technology was because organisations wanted multiple instances of operating systems to run on a single processor. As well as this server consolidation and power efficiencies were making the technology more attractive.

Another panellist in the debate session said virtualisation should be part and parcel of the OS. Steve Broadhead of Broadband Testing Labs said most enterprise can undertake virtualisation projects but caution needed to be exercised as there were "many potential problems and things can go wrong.".

"Mainstream software and OS's tend to work. It's the more obscure offerings where you are more likely to encounter difficulties," said Broadhead.

Paul Di Leo, chief executive at Zeus Technology said that software companies and ISVs could use virtualisation to roll out software as a service. "From our customers' perspectives deploying virtualisation can save money in server infrastructure, training costs and other applications at the back-end."

But Di Leo said the main challenge for application vendors was how to charge for this model.

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