The latest hot topics today are virtualization and cloud computing.  It is a development that we have been waiting on for a number of years and I am excited to see it here.  We are seeing more and more midsize and small organization start to investigate virtualization and how they can use it especially in disaster recovery scenarios.

The virtualization conversation often leads clients to the realization they should start evaluting shared storage in a SAN or NAS device.  They see direct attached storage limiting all the wonderful things they can do with a virtualized environment like moving servers from one physical box to another, snapshotting images, and replicating between sites.

And this is where cloud computing comes into play.  The work we do here moving our environments to the virtualized infrastructure puts us in line with the cloud computing movement.  Once we have abstracted our networks, server, and applications from their supporting layers it will allow us to essential create our own cloud infrastructure.

Once we have our own, then as the technology matures, we will be able to move pieces of that infrastructure in and out of our on premise or off premise cloud environment based on demands.  This is still several years away from becoming main stream, but it is coming.

The end result is the way we buy and manage hardware, software, applications, and data will be much different than the way we do it today.  We will gain access to some very advance software solutions because the cost of developing the infrastructure to support them can be shared across a greater population while at the same time allowing us to hold close the information we gain from it.  Imagine small research labs being able to run simulation software that before only organizations with enourmous capital budget could run?  The advancement we as a society could make with more minds working on a problem could usher in a whole new era of innovation.  Very exciting stuff!

Have you started the steps to the cloud with virtualization and centralized storage?  How has it impacted your future plans for the design and management of your infrastructure?