Quoting Law.com

When health care services provider WellSpan Health set out to find a way to manage 5,000 computers scattered across 80 Pennsylvania hospitals, pharmacies and diagnostic and surgical centers, it got an unexpected introduction to the world of computer virtualization.

Its search led it to software startup Altiris Inc., which offered not only an ingenious approach to managing desktops, but dramatically improved WellSpan's ability to upgrade all of its PCs. The software enables a single computer to run multiple versions of Windows, Adobe Acrobat or any other software application on the same machine at the same time, without risk of anything crashing or slowing down.

For WellSpan, which was overhauling its computing environment by converting from Windows 95- to Windows XP-based PCs, that meant desktops could run multiple operating systems at once. Without it, the company would have had to upgrade one computer at a time because introducing the newer operating system would cause the older version, which many workers would still be using, to crash.

"It was going to be a two-year process," recalls Tony DeFelice, WellSpan's program manager.

Altiris' product made it possible to complete all the upgrades in a few months. That's a very big deal to information technology staff struggling to update hundreds or thousands of computers running a hodgepodge of applications. But virtualization technology, which "tricks" multiple software programs into functioning as if they had a dedicated piece of hardware supporting them, isn't just helping with PC management. Indeed, it is spreading to the farthest recesses of companies' IT infrastructure.

Already a mainstay in data centers, where it enables single-server support of multiple software applications, virtualization technology is now helping enterprises increase the efficiency and performance of operating systems, networking equipment, data storage resources and desktops.

"Virtualization is a huge enabler in all the things companies are trying to accomplish, like consolidating infrastructure and breaking the tie between applications and infrastructure," says Yankee Group analyst George Hamilton. "It is the thing going on in IT today."

According to a recent report by tech researcher Enterprise Management Associates, 74 percent of enterprises use some variety of virtualization technology; of those who don't, 81 percent plan to.

Virtualization offers businesses a way to dig out from under mountains of equipment they haphazardly accumulated over the years, usually with little regard for the costs and complexity of maintaining these systems. Along the way, patches get built and middleware installed to fit all the pieces together into something that resembles a workable back-office. Despite these efforts, which monopolize IT staffers' time that would be better used trying to drive innovation, few companies today can claim that their IT performance is optimal.

Kevin Leahy, lead virtualization strategist at IBM Corp., says that companies typically spend only 30 percent of their technology budgets on hardware. The other 70 percent goes to maintain it, says Leahy, whose company is one of the most ardent advocates for virtualization across the enterprise.

To put it simply, virtualization makes computer hardware a lot more efficient, says Doug Gourlay, director of product management at Cisco Systems Inc.

"If you have an employee who works 20 percent on a full-time salary, you wouldn't be happy," he says.

While it can yield significant savings on hardware, space and power consumption costs, virtualization also offers other benefits.

In its recent survey of 150 companies, Enterprise Management Associates found that a critical driver in using the technology was that virtualization can enable more agile, more flexible systems. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said they were attracted by virtualization's ability to simplify how new applications are tested and accelerate the deployment of new products and services. Other major reasons for adopting the technology included more efficient server use, reduced systems downtime, enhanced disaster recovery, easier desktop administration and improved security.

In virtualizing an operating system, a standard PC platform, such as Windows or Linux, is used to host multiple operating systems. Application or desktop virtualization provides remote access to software tools so users don't have to install the technology on their desktops. Meanwhile, storage virtualization effectively untethers a computing device from a dedicated storage bank so it can tap storage resources wherever they are available in the enterprise. Thin-client computers, which rely on remote machines for processing and storage, are also considered a form of virtualization.

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