One of our really savvy Architects Ken Ahrens recently had an Aha! moment while visiting a financial institution. The customer was asking how our definition of virtualization was different than the more commonly known types of hardware and desktop virtualization already happening in most IT shops.
That's when it hit him: You are already familiar with virtualizing under-utilized systems -- servers and specific desktop OS configurations that don't need as much dedicated hardware and capacity as expected. That's certainly useful for trimming some IT costs.
But what about the over-utilized systems -- those critical and costly applications, services and mainframes that are just too big, or too remote to be replicated on a VM? The over-utilized systems represent a lot of cost, and big constraints for our ability to deliver and test software. Surely there must be a way to virtualize these too?
Well after a lot more analysis on this topic with Ken, we have a new iTKO whitepaper, "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems," that addresses how companies can identify and start to virtualize these over-utilized systems.
We'll be posting some additional notes and excerpts from the paper explaining the concept here in the future as well.
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