The E-Commerce Times writes:

Microsoft put an exclamation point on the virtualization marketplace with the April 3 announcement that future versions of its virtual machine products will support Linux. The brave new world of virtualization makes bedfellows of Microsoft and proprietary software vendors like VMware with Xen and the open source community.

Addictive Benefits

This electronic ménage -- a virtual alliance and not a traditional partnership -- offers the collaborative benefits of federated information systems, swapping cross-domain intellectual DNA to simplify information services.

Strategically, like shifting tectonic plates, the information marketplace released megatons of accumulated stress with Microsoft's announcement and moved closer to the information Holy Grail: information as a utility service.

The virtual machine marketplace is atop every IT prognosticator's list of hot growth technologies. The economic and business benefits of abstracting the information layer from the operating systems and hardware, and eventually the network, are addictive. It's as if the fuel-efficiency ratings for gas-guzzlers doubled at no additional cost.

Freed from the tedium of managing arcane parameters for operating systems, storage and platform configurations, we humans can do more information processing with less horsepower.

Moore's Law and the rate of technological change get juiced up a notch, and the virtual opposable thumb is freed to develop new tools for problems that somebody will pay for.

Common Denominator

Before we get too carried away, however, a few big hurdles remain. Virtualization does a much better job of masking complexity and securely applying computing horsepower behind a firewall than do compute grids -- but it does not give us the information kilowatt.

Before you can plug all your information appliances into a wall socket -- or connect to virtual information services over a wireless signal -- the marketplace needs a common definition for a unit of information service.

It needs the information equivalent of a kilowatt of electricity to mask the complexity of what happens behind the scenes in creating, transforming and delivering the information service.

The information kilowatt provides the economic and technical yardstick for measuring efficiency and providing the marketplace with choices. A mature information marketplace is analogous to the one for deregulated electricity, in which consumers choose among differentiated generators powered by wind, solar, coal or nuclear energy for a commodity service. Consumers weigh their buying decisions against the cost per information kilowatt.

The virtual machine's ability to abstract information services from the underlying operating systems, hardware and networks takes us a step closer to the information kilowatt. The problem of information processing, storage and distribution can be bundled into a virtual machine as the common denominator.

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