Demystifying virtualization

Simply put, Virtualization is about sharing resources of a single computer across multiple environments and users. Virtualization helps increase the utilization and flexibility of hardware by making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. A more radical way of thinking is of virtualization as a method that allows you to transform hardware into software.

Anyone who uses a computer can benefi t from virtualization. It saves time, money, energy and helps people achieve morewith the computer hardware they already own. Software such as VMware ESX helps transform or virtualize the hardware resources of a computer including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller to create a fully functional virtual machine. Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with each other so that several operating systems and applications can be run at the same time on a single computer.

For small to mid size organizations, there are several benefits of virtualization that are direct and upfront – reduce costs of IT staff, get a service provider to remotely provision a range of services covering hardware, storage, backups, content filtering, patch management, license management, information security and several other such everyday uses priced as utility bundles from a managed service provider. The biggest benefit will be that of having enterprise class IT assets and services at an affordable pay per use pricing model which will help such companies reduce their ‘sunk costs’ into large IT assets that will obsolete soon.

Levels of virtualization

While a single computer can be easily virtualized, software such as VMware also allows creation of a robust virtualization platform that can scale across several interconnected computers and storage devices to form a virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization helps create pools of dynamic resources

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Don’t ignore small growth

According to Ray Kurzweil, an avid and renowned innovator, it takes only 7 periods of doublings to turn one percent growth into 100 percent growth. “So small growth should not be dismissed.”

At a presentation in MIT recently, he said “information technology- driven innovation is characterized by exponential growth, not linear growth, which causes almost everyone to miss their projections of when technology-fueled advances will take off.” Exponential growth means that performance doubles in a given period. Then in the next period (say a year), that doubles.

He also said because we don’t understand this, we dismiss the potential of such technologies as solar energy, which is doubling every two years. Kurzweil says that in fewer than 5 years we will reach the tipping point where solar power will be less expensive than fossil-fuel power.

21st Century 1000 times faster than 20th

Ray Kurzweil also illustrated the growth of various technologies over the centuries. His main point: technology evolves exponentially, the rate of technical progress itself is accelerating, so expect to “see 20,000 years of progress in the 21st Century, about 1000 times greater than the 20th Century.”

One of the predictors of the power of the internet, Kurzweil believe we can say good bye to cancer and heart disease within 15 years, and hello to living way past 80. Among his other prognostications – computers “will combine the subtlety and pattern recognition of human intelligence with the speed, memory and knowledge sharing of machine intelligence.” The marriage of nano technology and AI will bring us “a killer app”-- nanobots that can keep us healthy from the inside. Wow!

The best selling author of The Age of Spiritual Machines presents the next stage of his compelling view of the future: the merging of humans and machines.

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It's time to reinvent Management : Hamel

Gary Hamel is distraught at the way Management is lagging behind all other sciences and that very little effort is being made by the acamedia. He is frustrated with the fact that so few management professors seem committed to inventing the future of management.

"Unlike their counterparts in medicine, engineering, and computer science, business school professor don't generally see themselves as the inventors of new methods, tools and approaches most study managament as it is, and...To read the complete article click here: http://emagazine.managementnext.com
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World Wide Computer

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