Software virtualisation - your road to a 'very' easy life
Sometimes I just can't see the wood for the trees...
We announced our intention to buy Softricity a couple of months ago, but I didn't take much notice. I'm one of those people who needs to actually get my hands on a product, or see a compelling demo of a product so that I can visualise just what it can do. Press releases just don't cut it for me at all. I'm a blogger - I like reading information that has been delivered to me in a much more real and human way than just reading the PR document or press release. So I thought I would wait for a while until I could have a play with the SoftGrid features after the acqusition was complete. Well I was chatting to Mike the other day and he persuaded me to get my act together about SaaS and to have another look.
Mike has been banging on about Software as a Service (SaaS) for some time now, but this is the first application that I've seen that actually gave me the WOW! moment. The demo showing how application virtualisation works turns on the lightbulb of possibility for me. This will give you the opportunity to save yourself a lot of aggravation and so much time. And I bet that your helpdesk calls will go down too.
Sharon explains the concept of virtualisation really well in her blog, but the thing that really makes me see the value of virtualisation on a practical level is the reclaiming of physical space. I did some work on Server consolidation for a customer in London Docklands who were running out of floor space. They had already maxed out all of the power supply in the whole building, and now physically couldn't get any more servers into the building, or the floor would collapse. (Thank goodness virtual servers don't weigh anything). And with the recent announcement about Windows Datacenter having unlimited virtualisation rights (see John and Clive's blog for more information) you can start to reclaim even more floor space and virtualise whatever you want.
But the best thing for me is that the configuration of the application is all virtualised. You don't need to install anything. Nothing gets loaded in the registry, nothing is held on the operating system. Your rollouts will be simple, managing your environment will be simple. All of your applications will be held in a centrally managed service on a server. Fabulous news.
Hold on - didn't we have this when the mainframe was king? Ah yes, but that was a long long time ago in the land of the green screens. Perhaps that's why I'm so excited about this. I can see the potential of virtually anything delivered as a service...
And no more registry tweaks either...