IBM's Inna Kuznetsova speaks about virtualization

Recently, Inna Kuznetsova, Vice President, IBM Systems Software, presented a webinar about the changing economics of virtualization. When IBM speaks about virtualization technology, I always find time to listen.

IBM clearly was one of the companies responsible for the innovative notion that functions could be placed into an artificial or virtual environment. IBM was one of the first companies to come to understand that virtualizing the environment would bring benefits that far outweighed the technical challenges such a move would create.

If we track the history of IBM’s efforts along this line we can sketch out many different lines of virtualization that either were created for IBM's family of systems.

What Inna Kuznetsova had to say

• IT is a function under stress in many organizations.
  • It is handling a massive amount of work today
  • It is expected to do more tomorrow
  • It is also expected to find ways to reduce overall costs at the same time.

• IBM offers tools that make it possible to consolidate resources, manage workloads, automate processes, and optimize delivery of IT services. All of these taken together mean that IT organizations can respond to the environment they find themselves in today.
• The session then went on to discuss individual IBM products and what they do to help organizations address the requirements to do more with less.

Snapshot analysis

IBM is one of the few suppliers that is in a position to honestly say that it has products in each and every category of virtualization as described in the Kusnetzky Group Model (see Sorting out the different layers of virtualization for more information.)

I'm sorry to say, however, that this one session didn't really cover everything IBM has to say on the subject (no short session could possibly address everything IBM is doing.) This time, the session seemed to largely focus on virtual machine software, storage virtualization and software for management of virtual resources.

While those are important issues, IBM and its partners offers products in many other areas including:

• access virtualization
• application virtualization
• processing virtualization
• storage virtualization
• network virtualization
• both security and management for virtual environments.

This session discussed only a small part of how the company uses its technology to help its customers work efficiently, to make the best use of its IT resources and to manage their IT resources whether physical, virtual or cloud.

What's refreshing to see is that this technology is not new and untested. IBM's virtualization technology can be found in production in all of its mainframe and most of its midrange and industry standard system sites.