Virtualisation reduces costs

Research has revealed that the number of server systems shipped with a virtualisation platform on top reached 358 000 units in Western Europe last year, a 26.5% increase from 2007, says Global Gold.

Such virtualisation technology is significantly impacting the server market, the report from IDC noted.

Virtualisation is "quick and straightforward", stated Giorgio Nebuloni, research analyst with IDC European Systems and Infrastructure Solutions.

Virtualisation company VMware says its new platform to let organisations virtualise smartphones and mobile devices will show up in handsets next year, states ZDNet.

The mobile phone is now as important to businesses as desktop computers, and acts as a mobile computer in many cases, said Stephen Herrod, VMware chief technology officer, speaking at the Interop industry conference in Las Vegas last week.

Although Herrod said the project is still in its "early stages", researchers at VMware are working on a VMware mobile virtualisation platform, which will create a virtual machine for mobile devices, allowing users to move their phone to different handsets

Typically, when IT departments decide to use virtualisation in the data centre, the big question is which workloads to virtualise, reports ZDNet.

The conventional wisdom has been to avoid virtualising anything that is too I/O-intensive, such as databases and e-mail systems.

However, EMC wants to put that idea to rest. The company, which owns virtualisation market leader VMware, spent a lot of time at EMC World 2009 driving home the point to IT professionals that the entire data centre can be virtualised.