Bladewatch.com

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/39a1c45e0bb016adc4d1ef2a003e8d73.htm

NEW YORK (Associated Press) – While the impact of virtualization technology may already be moderating growth in the server market, its impact on desktops won’t be significantly felt until at least 2010, Lehman Brothers analyst Tim Luke said Tuesday.

Virtualization technology allows a computer to split its power among more than one operating system, essentially enabling the computer to act as multiple machines. The technology is already being used in the server market, where it is seen as a way to do more with fewer machines.

Check out this article talking about virtualization of the desktop, whether there will be significant impact on the desktop function.  We’ll have to see. I suspect desktop virtualization adoption is going to be a more natural migration process, I’ll explain that in a minute. In the server arena, there is pressure as a result of data center space, cooling and power, with the desktop, the issues are more about energy efficiency, of centralization and reducing costs. Back to the natural migration process. We need to improve the desktop experience, we need to reduce the support costs and there are a number of ways of doing this. What organizations are going to face is a mixture of ownership, data center and charge back issues. If we virtualize the desktop who owns it? Server or desktop guys? Who owns the service in terms of service delivery and considering the different user profiles which user group would take priority in the event of a performance problem or a helpdesk call. Not an issue in the physical world, where I can allocate them a trader workstation. In the virtual world, does this mean I have to restrict the ratio of users per server? Doesn’t this increase the cost? On the data center front, many organizations are trying to be more efficient with their data center space and cooling, I can virtualize the desktop on to blade workstations or even split a DL585 up between 25 users, but in a site of 2000 or 3000 people, that’s an awful lot of servers to provide a user desktop. Charge back mainly in terms of economics. The desktop function is a fixed cost, yes it might not work perfectly – a pc rebuild might take a few days, and you might want it to be faster, but it’s fixed, the pc as a unit continues to decrease in capital cost (on the basis  £400 machine is actually quite good these days).

By natural migration, I mean examples such as, we’ve bought organizationA, which has 30 users in 10 different sites in different regions, they use Office and already have pcs, but we want to centralize the support function and reduce cost. Deploy a linux terminal with Citrix which will then give them the applications they need be it Office or in house applications. Or in terms of migrating user groups or business lines to a virtual desktop, the back office guys who need Office and a few in house written applications, might be the target for a thin client running a virtual desktop so that we don’t have to supply that site, that user community with a pc that requires patching and support. It’s binary, it either works or it doesn’t. It might even be the solution for your business continuity, to avoid having to have pcs that need regularly refreshed every time you do a hardware refresh.

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