Application virtualisation ‘gaining acceptance’

Application virtualisation is emerging as the next step for organisations consolidating their infrastructure, analyst firm IDC has said.

Server virtualisation has rapidly gained acceptance as a cost-effective method for partitioning server resources to improve resource use, according to John Humphreys, programme director of IDC Enterprise Platform Group.

Humphries said the next step was extending virtualisation to the application layer of the IT stack, helping to satisfy user demand to better respond to business challenges.

“By decoupling static and siloed applications from dedicated datacentre infrastructure, it is possible to match resource and performance requirements in real-time,” said Humphreys.

He made the comments in response to the vision laid out by application virtualisation software provider DataSynapse of a real-time infrastructure that helps large organisations align IT resources with business objectives.

By addressing the business issues of both computing supply and application demand, the supplier claims businesses can improve service quality to corporate end-users and customers, reducing operating expenses and creating new revenue streams more quickly.

“By aggregating server capacity into a virtual resource pool that can be adaptively allocated based on application demand, schedule or priority, organisations are able to increase flexibility and better respond to changing business needs,” said Humphreys.

Through application virtualisation, using policy-based automation to intelligently match available server supply with application demand, DataSynapse said organisations were looking to gain control of complex enterprise applications. It also can help enable automation of service level management and improve application performance.

It said re-using existing resources in this way could reduce an organisation’s application and infrastructure footprint by 30% – eliminating the need to purchase new hardware for, in some cases, as long as 18 months.

IDC on virtualisation >>

Microsoft forges on with virtualisation strategy >>

VirtualizeIT offers course on the benefits of IT virtualisation >>

How virtualising applications can protect computers from their installed software >>

Comment on this article: computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk