IDC Sees More Mobility in Virtualisation

By Greg McNevin

May 6, 2008: IDC is tipping the future of virtualisation to be mobility and live migration, while adding that so far the rapid embracement of the technology has helped change the economics of IT by reducing both capital and operational costs.

The analyst firm says that as customers become more familiar with the technology, virtualisation is increasingly being used to solve more than just server consolidation challenges.

IDC says that while the next logical step is virtualisation for client or desktop consolidation, there are a number of problems that must be overcome for server-hosted virtual desktops (vdi) to be a mainstream business reality.

It believes the next wave of adoption will be centred on addressing server downtime, which it estimated cost organisations roughly US$140 billion worldwide in lost worker productivity and revenue in 2007.

Because virtualisation software decouples applications from hardware, virtual servers can be copied, backed up, replicated, and moved like a file. A growing number of virtualisation software providers are taking advantage of this ability to do live migrations and quickly reallocate resources without downtime.

“By directly addressing the need for cost effective business continuity, virtualisation will alter the economics of IT a second time,” said John Humphreys, program vice president in IDC's Enterprise Platform Group. “More importantly, mobility will be the defining feature that will move virtualisation beyond just a tool for consolidation.

“The embrace of mobility will allow customers to use virtualisation for business continuity, capacity planning, and eventually as a solution in delivering service-oriented computing.”

Comment on this story