Virtualization Plays Well with Others

With all the lists out there about computing trends, sometimes it’s useful to look at how they all fit together.

Yesterday, Mainframe Weekly’s Trevor Eddolls compared on-demand computing and virtualization, noting that each offer a way of satisfying demands for computing resources. On-demand computing requires hardware to generate capacity, while virtualization does not:

“You don’t need more, you just utilize what you already have better. Virtualization techniques allow hardware to ‘appear’ to be available to users. It can even make non-existent devices appear to be available. …[T]he important point in this debate is that it maximizes the usage of the hardware that is installed.”

The tradeoff, however, is that on-demand computing is generally an easier solution to implement while virtualization requires specialized expertise on the part of IT staff.

Software as a service, or SaaS, can bridge the gap between the immediate benefits of on-demand and the long-term benefits of virtualization. If we think of it as an on-demand computing model as applied to applications, rather than capacity, we can see how it might tie in with virtualization. Navdip Bhachech offers one scenario:

“Virtualization is a core technology pattern, and has multiple uses - add SaaS to that list. The ability to sandbox an application in a virtual environment is useful - multiple instances of the application can be setup for multiple tenants without interefering with each other. No rearchitecture necessary.”

In a nutshell, virtualization works in so many situations across the hardware/software stack, and helps to complement so many other exciting new technologies, that it’s something for IT shops to start seriously contemplating. Even if it isn’t right for your enterprise today, it very well might be in the future.