11.15.06

Of all the current hyped technologies right now, virtualization is second only to software as a service for me in excitement. Here is a good story from AMD about how Deloitte uses blades and virtualization effectively. This article really caught my eye because the hardware being used is very similar to what GXS is deploying as our next generation blade platform. We are currently making production use of VMWare, and experimenting with XenSource as a possible next generation platform.

There are many reasons this combination of technologies is important, notably the cost savings from server consolidation — but by far the most exciting is that potential to go faster through increased agility. Over the past couple of years we have been changing our development process to be more agile, adopting practices like daily (okay, twice weekly) builds, test automation, etc. But the ability to make servers — virtual, in this case — available quickly and on-demand, that is very powerful.

When I was in college I had a friend who worked in tech support for WordPerfect, and it always amazed me that they had every kind of printer they could buy — just so they could replicate a client’s problem and fix it. Very soon, we may be able to have complete software environments, for internal and external clients, stored as virtual machine images in the event we need to bring them up…