Why is virtualization so confusing?
Dan Kusnetzky had an interesting post last week titled “Virtualization – Trend or Buzzword?” Based on our experiences with customers about virtualized infrastructures, we can relate to Dan’s insights on the subject. In their eagerness to tap into the virtualization trend, companies that are a long way from virtualization solutions are creatively renaming products to get on the virtualization bandwagon.
The mainstream market has yet to fully embrace virtualization technologies, and we suspect that market hype and market jargon may be contributing to this. For mass adoption of virtualization to happen, CIOs need to be comfortable that “virtualization solutions” really are virtualizing, and the language used to describe solution features and functions are clear, concise and credible. After all, they are the ones “signing the checks” and they should know what they’re getting.
Hmmmm…maybe a virtualization glossary might help? Stay tuned…
Many of the industry research firms have developed virtualization taxonomies. While I was at IDC, I developed that firm’s model of virtualization. Since that time, several analysts, including Vernon Turner, Jean Bozman, John Humphries and others have further refined the model.
Most are trying to name each of the layers of virtualization that may be used to present a logical view of a computing environment, which may be quite different than the physical view.
It is pretty clear that network virtualization, storage virtualization, processing virtualization, application virtualization, access virtualization, security for virtualized environments and management for virtualized environments all need to be included. This is the model I’m currently using.
May 26th, 2007 at 4:42 am[...] few months back we acknowledged here on our blog the common misconceptions behind the term “virtualization.” After thinking about it [...]
August 15th, 2007 at 5:42 am[...] of virtual machine software. This is an important area to address because as we’ve discussed here before, the term “virtualization” is getting misconstrued frequently in and around the [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 2:49 pm