An extract from Quinton O'Reilly's article in the Sunday Business Post. As virtualisation is now a constant in all businesses, the main question is how best to manage it.
Considering how commonplace virtualisation is, it’s easy to overlook the developments in the space and the impact they have had.
In the last few months in particular there has been news of a number of new partnerships and acquisitions, including VMware announcing a deal with Oracle, and HP acquiring endpoint security company Bromium.
But lest anyone expects this activity to be a sign of bigger things to come, it’s a case of incremental evolution rather than revolution.
There is now such a great mixture of services out there that you can choose the combinations that suit your business the most.
For Stephen O’Herlihy, chief technology officer of PFH Technology Group, virtualisation will always be a part of it. But the real question is what kind of hybrid mix to decide upon.
“Sometimes firms call it the dilemma [where they] can’t put all of their workloads up in the public cloud. Therefore they have to invest in their infrastructure because it’s ageing,” he said.
“The dilemma is why would you bother using public cloud if you have to make an investment on-premise? That’s the lead-on to hybrid, where the answer is both. It’s not on-premise versus off-premise; it’s on-premise with public cloud.”
For the most part, modern vendors are able to wrap their services around these multiple providers so that it’s easier to manage everything. It’s a fact of life now, and providers like PFH have adjusted their offerings to accommodate that. “No matter what, every customer you go into will always have a multi-vendor strategy,” said O’Herlihy. “There’s no customer in the globe that’s just using one solution, but your typical enterprise space, they’re going to have everything from VMware to Microsoft to Commvault to Dell to HP, you name it.”
While virtualisation will remain a core part of many business processes, what is not going to slow down any time soon is the rate of change. New players will emerge and upend what we already know about virtualisation.
