Trigence Blog

IDC’s annual report on the virtualization market re-enforces that the enterprise still has a great deal of work to do. Though there has been a great deal of progress, companies have not mastered the ability to drive down the power & cooling costs of the data center through virtualization. Hardware costs are one of three cost management areas in IT but software and human resource costs cannot be overlooked as they take up the majority. Physical & OS virtualization vendors are providing value by offering a mechanism for driving the hardware costs down such as power & cooling. But what is left behind is a more complex environment for software creating virtual application & OS bundles, which in turn becomes a more complex environment for configuration management by VM sprawl for IT personnel.

While physical virtualization drives down hardware costs, application virtualization furthers the cost reduction benefits and, more importantly, creates new business growth by tuning up or down the business applications in a “high control” fashion that before now was only possible in a limited fashion. Application virtualization can be used to complement physical and/or OS virtualization because it ensures that all data center applications can benefit from this consolidation effort. All this, without having to re-write a line of application code or support every unique OS type per application. Our customers are consolidating hundreds of applications previously written to run on an older OS. These apps are now running on consolidated servers leveraging a single service patch level of an OS. This is just the beginning of the opportunity for IT organizations.

Consolidation is just one step on the ladder to utility computing -- aligning IT to the pulse of each line of business. By leveraging otherwise complex and infrastructure-bound applications into modernized standard objects, businesses are realizing the benefits of running applications when, where and how they want.