Gartner: Virtualisation to rewrite IT rules

Virtualisation is so likely to have the greatest impact on operations and infrastructure, Gartner has today published a special report on its potential to rewrite the rules of IT management, deployment, planning and purchasing.

The latest, software-based consolidation craze will be the highest impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, according to the technology analyst. It predicts virtualisation will transform how IT is managed, bought, deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged.

"As a result, virtualisation is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years," it said.

Phil Dawson, Gartner vice president, distinguished analyst and the report's author was quick to point out that and virtualisation is not a new concept. Storage has already been virtualised - albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures - and networking is also virtualised, he said.

But Dawson added: "As both server and PC virtualisation become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT."

With fast emerging market leaders like the VMware hypervisor or late followers with the might of Microsoft and its eagerly awaited Hyper-V, it is not surprising Gartner sees server virtualisation as leading this change.

The report pointed out that server virtualisation is already having an impact on the server market: Gartner believes that virtualisation reduced the x86 server market by four per cent in 2006. And, as hypervisor prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualisation will have a significantly larger impact. Accordingly, it predicts that more than four million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.

The report also found the use of PC virtualisation is also set to increase rapidly, where the number of individual virtualised PCs is expected to explode from less than five million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. This, it said, will be achieved either by machine virtualisation, which breaks the dependencies between hardware and software at operating system (OS) level or by application virtualisation, between the OS and applications layer.

Although application virtualisation is gaining considerable interest, Gartner maintained that it is machine virtualisation that will have a greater long-term impact, making personal computing more manageable, flexible and secure by allowing multiple, individual footprints to be defined on the same device.

And management will take place at a business service level, requiring maximum systems interoperability.

Thomas Bittman, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, said: "Traditionally the operating system has been the centre of gravity for client and server computing, but new technologies, new modes of computing and infrastructure virtualisation and automation are changing the architecture and role of the operating system. The days of the monolithic, general-purpose operating system will soon be over."

In response to uncertainty Gartner said would prevail over the market in the short-to-medium term, Bittman warned users against getting locked into one vendor's vision and instead advised them to make their own strategic business decisions about architecture changes and control, building toward it with a constantly updated plan.

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