Virtulisation will impact IT as much as cellphones impacted fixed-line infrastructure, says VMWare SA.
Speaking at the ITWeb Virtualisation of the Enterprise conference at Gallagher Estate this week, Chris Norton, regional manager for VMWare, told delegates that Gartner believes virtualisation will be the highest impact trend in infrastructure and operations in 2012.
"The number of servers are increasing by 10% to 12% annually," Norton said. "And maintaining server infrastructure can consume 65% of the average IT budget."
Peter Armstrong, corporate strategist at BMC Software, said IDC research shows that 50% of the IT budget will be spent on power by 2010.
However, according to CIO's 2008 "Virtualisation of the Enterprise Survey", 85% of IT organisations already have virtualised servers, he said.
Gartner also predicts that in 2010, all new PC deployments will be virtualised, said Norton.
"The local marketplace should double in the next year," said Norton. "In South Africa, we are at advantage because we can leapfrog trends. We can learn from international mistakes and go from zero to hero."
Norton's personal prediction is that in four to five years, the hypervisor will begin to perform the role of an operating system. A hypervisor is a virtualisation platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time, according to Wikipedia.
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