RE: "The whys and wherefores of virtualization"

During my morning scan, I came across Martin Ingram's new "Virtually Everything" blog over at Computerworld. Martin, by the way, is the VP of Strategy over at AppSense. Welcome to the world of blogging, Martin.

It appears from his first post, that Martin will be working from the view that virtualization is the use of virtual machine technology to consolidate and optimize workloads on industry standard systems. While it is quite possible that Martin holds a broader view of this type of technology, the post speaks about virtual machine technology and its use as if that one area of technology makes up the whole of "virtualization."

The industry has now experienced well over thirty years of virtualization history on Mainframes, mid-range machines, and, of course industry standard systems. It is a broad topic that includes access, application, processing, network, storage virtualization as well as layers that focus on managfement and security for virtualized environments. So, it is clear that virtualization is a far bigger topic that just one type of virtualization technology that is part of only one of seven layers of virtualization. (see Sorting out the different layers of virtualization for a more complete model of virtualization.)

I think it vitally important that IT decision makers rise above such a narrow viewpoint to see a broad landscape of virtualization technology.