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INDUSTRY NEWS


6 May 2008

Future of Virtualisation 'Lies in Mobility'


With the rapid uptake of virtualisation having lowered capital costs and reduced operational costs in IT, analyst IDC believes that the technology will increasingly be used to solve more than just server consolidation.

According to the research company, the next wave of adoption will likely be focused on reducing problems and costs associated with system downtime, something that cost $140 billion (£70.9 billion) worldwide in lost productivity and revenue in 2007 alone.

IDC explained that virtualised servers can be copied, backed up, replicated and moved like a normal file and suggested that capability, along with the ability of many product offerings to do live migrations, would provide a low cost means of relocating computing 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, vice president of platforms at IDC.

"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."

Around 90 per cent of the world's top 1,000 companies have some sort of virtualisation infrastructure in place, according to Gartner.

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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