Virtualisation

For some years now virtualisation has been a proven and widely used method for running multiple independent operating systems on one server. It's a way of maximising the use of physical resources so as to optimise the investment in hardware. As Moore's Law accurately predicted the exponential growth of the calculation power of computers, and the hardware requirements for those same calculation tasks are largely unchanged, it is now possible to deploy a relatively inexpensive commodity server to run from 8 to 16 virtual servers.

Virtualisation is also the ultimate driving force to have your own datacenter evolve into a ‘Private Cloud' concept. Key elements are standardisation, automation, self service, internal billing, security, high availability and manageability. In the coming years it will be a major challenge to lift the virtual environments to this level.