make sense to extend that strategy across the enterprise?
If you're inclined to agree, the next logical step would be storage virtualization, because you're dealing with another technology residing in the data center. The advantages of creating a virtual storage pool include lower-cost data migration, easier storage-resource management, common replication services and the ability to maximize and extend your storage resources.
Client virtualization, which comes in a variety of options, also offers real benefits. In the hosted virtual-desktop setup, applications are hosted on a server and users work on thin-client machines. This would be ideal, for example, in a call center.
In another version of desktop virtualization, one physical machine is virtualized. Here, separate business and personal zones could be created on mobile workers' laptops for security and compliance.
Or multiple operating systems could be run on a single PC. This scenario would apply to engineers, for example, who might be running a specific Unix or Linux-based technical application but using Windows for e-mail and other basic applications.
Most companies today are in the first stage of virtualization, says Gartner analyst George Weiss. This means they're consolidating and virtualizing servers as cost-cutting measures, typically with a single vendor.
The next phase would be using virtualization technology for the dynamic allocation of resources across servers. And the final phase, which won't occur for several more years, is heterogeneous virtualization, the ability to move workloads dynamically across hardware platforms.
Cloud computing
As we arrive at 2009, cloud computing is the technology creating the most buzz. Cloud technology is in its infancy, however, and enterprises would be wise to limit their efforts to small, targeted projects until the technology matures and vendors address a variety of potentially deal-breaking problems.
First off, let's define cloud computing. Gartner says it is "a style of computing whose massively scalable and elastic, IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies."
The two most commonly cited examples of cloud offerings come from Amazon.com and Google, both of which basically rent their data-center resources to outside customers.
For example, Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) lets customers rent virtual-machine instances and run their applications on Amazon's hardware. Other services under the EC2 umbrella include storage and databases in the cloud. Amazon uses Xen for virtualization and offers customers a choice of Linux, Solaris or Windows operating systems.
The pitch is that customers can take advantage of Amazon's expertise in running large data centers, that customers pay only for the compute and storage resources they use, and that Amazon can scale up or down easily, depending on the demand.
That's the most basic level of cloud computing - infrastructure in the cloud. In this scenario, the customer is aware of and makes choices concerning the infrastructure itself.
The next level is cloud computing as a Web development platform. The best example is Google's App Engine, a place where Web application developers can upload code (as long as it's written in Python) and let Google's infrastructure take care of deploying the application and allocating compute resources.
The third level is running enterprise applications in the cloud. A cloud vendor could host an enterprise application and take responsibility for that application's availability and performance. Gartner predicts e-mail will become one of the first enterprise applications that move to the cloud.
How is that different from software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Without getting too tangled up in semantics, SaaS typically refers to a specific vendor - Salesforce.com, for example - offering its application to multiple customers in a hosted model. Theoretically, a SaaS vendor could use the cloud infrastructure to host its applications. Also theoretically, a cloud provider could host anybody's application.
That brings us to the ultimate cloud scenario, in which these "private" clouds owned by such companies as Amazon and Google melt into one giant, public cloud that contains all the user's data and applications and
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