Virtualisation surfs the plateau of productivity

Research and analysis house Gartner invented the hype cycle in 1995 to describe how technologies tend to pass through various phases, all the way from invention through to doing useful work.

The hype cycle curve goes as follows: it starts with invention, rocketing to the summit of the peak of inflated expectations, plunges into the trough of disillusionment, climbs up the slope of enlightenment and finally levels out on the plateau of productivity. Virtualisation has, I would argue, started to clamber onto that final plateau.

Reports are now emerging on a regular basis suggesting that, from being all the rage on paper, virtualisation is now starting to pay dividends. Data centre managers are putting what started as pilot projects into full production, and are seeing real savings from the ability to stuff a number of VMs into a handful of powerful servers, replacing huge numbers of individual servers and a lot of hardware maintenance fees.

Naturally, in their wake come the vendors of VM management products - you still have to manage the applications, of course, just as you did before when they were tied to discrete lumps of hardware.

And now there's a lot of talk about orchestrated data centres, where the data centre is the unit of management, and the VMs sort themselves out, depending on where the resources are that they require.

This, I submit, is so much hot air. But it will come...it will have to, or the management load will be outrageous. Watch with interest as this technology climbs the peak of inflated expectations...