IDF 2007: Intel rides virtualisation wave

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Intel used this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco to drill home the fact that it believes virtualisation is headed for the big time.

"Virtualisation is a very powerful force in the industry today," the company's senior vice president and general manager of its digital enterprise group told delegates during his keynote speech at the event. "We're now in the process of re-plumbing the entire platform for virtualisation."

Looking back at the innovation that has occurred in the last 10 years as the chip giant celebrates the 10th anniversary of the IDF, Gelsinger reiterated the points he made about the potential of virtualisation during VMworld last week, suggesting that this technology will be one of the driving forces over the next decade, alongside the two other key issues of security and manageability.

"I presented our vision for virtualisation [at the event] and I looked at some of the key observations around virtualisation technologies. [Historically] we've had a one-to-one relationship between the operating system (OS) and the underlying platform. Virtualisation essentially disaggregates this relationship thus disaggregating the traditional view of the OS. But, and maybe more powerfully, it gives us an opportunity to re-aggregate or create the datacenter-wide OS of the future. And, in that sense, we think that it opens up doors that never before were imagined for IT value.

"We believe this is the beginning of the first wave of virtualisation."

As with any new or emerging technologies, businesses may still struggle to measure the value and performance because standard methodologies don't generally exist. Gelsinger claims the company's vConsolidate benchmark is a way of remedying that situation for the new dawn of virtualisation.

"Virtualisation doesn't have well-proven benchmarks so how can you show that this one is better than that one? Intel and others are coming together to say 'Let's develop an industry standard way to measure virtualisation performance."

In addition to talking about industry trends and predictions, Intel didn't overlook the opportunity to plug its own recent launch that has a virtualisation flavour.

"Two weeks ago we introduced the Caneland platform," Gelsinger added. "Caneland, in our perspective, is the virtualisation and consolidation platform for the industry."

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