Lisa Crewe

Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo Virtualization is the key technology for the cloud. Its ability to separate the OS and application from the hardware enable it to best deliver on-demand cloud services. Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT, said it best: "Without virtualization there is no cloud - that's what enabled the emergence of this new, sustainable industry." But, how can IT organizations leverage virtualization to create their own private cloud? Virtualization Evolution: The Three Stages Typically, organizations advance through three stages of virtualization as shown in Figure 1. The first stage is characterized by virtualizing the "low hanging fruit." Consolidation and disaster recovery strategies are initially focused on garnering the capital expenditure savings from virtualizing applications that have low business impact. The second stage of virtua... (more)

Three Virtualization Management Myths Busted

Virtualization promises significant dollar savings. Since reducing cost is perhaps the biggest goal in today's corporate data centers, it's no wonder that virtualization efforts are accelerating. So far it's been easy to virtualize commodity servers that host less-critical utility applications. But after virtualizing all this "low-hanging fruit," IT now has to successfully virtualize higher-priority I/O intensive applications such as Exchange, SQL server, Oracle or SAP to improve its return on investment. Performance is critical for these business applications, and ensuring prod... (more)