Companies respond to data growth in risky, cost-intensive ways, including: buying more storage, even when capacity might exist elsewhere in the network; overbuying capacity so that they can minimize the impact of hardware change in the future; moving disks around to where it is needed, incurring disruption and high management penalties; making multiple copies of data; and adding servers with their own storage to avoid future disruption. 

The answer to these challenges can be found in Virtualization.

Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility.  It allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components.

Virtual machines are encapsulated into files, making it possible to rapidly save, copy and provision a virtual machine. Full systems (fully configured applications, operating systems, BIOS and virtual hardware) can be moved, within seconds, from one physical server to another for zero-downtime maintenance and continuous workload consolidation.

Benefits of Virtualization

Partitioning
-  Multiple applications and operating systems can be supported within a single physical system.
-  Servers can be consolidated into virtual machines on either a scale-up or scale-out architecture.
-  Computing resources are treated as a uniform pool to be allocated to virtual machines in a controlled manner

Isolation
-  Virtual machines are completely isolated from the host machine and other virtual machines. If a virtual machine crashes, all others are unaffected.
-  Data does not leak across virtual machines and applications can only communicate over configured network connections.

Encapsulation
-  Complete virtual machine environment is saved as a single file; easy to back up, move and copy.
-  Standardized virtualized hardware is presented to the application - guaranteeing compatibility.

With virtualization, the migration process becomes far more manageable and therefore cost-effective.   Virtualization changes everything. Not immediately or even necessarily quickly, but over the next few years virtualization will redefine how we run enterprise infrastructure and give us a richer range of choices with which to create solutions.