Quoting from InfoWorld

New technologies can change the relationship of supplier and customer. New applications can create huge infrastructure implications. And sometimes the best way to learn how to cope with these changes is to face them squarely. To give you early warning, we queried various experts and found five technologies that have the significant potential to transform the way your IT department does business in the coming years.

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Disruption 2: Server consolidation and virtualization

Leading vendors: EMC/VMware, Liquid Computing, Microsoft, Sun

Old thinking: PCs running a single OS

IT impact: Quicker software development and rapid application deployment, cutting costs and better leveraging server hardware

The concept behind virtual machines (VMs) is simple to state but hard to implement: Take a single server and divvy it into separate "virtual" machines with their own software-built memory, virtual hardware, drive images and other resources. Virtualization isn't new: IBM has been doing this on its mainframes for close to 30 years. What is new is that the power of virtual machines can be effectively delivered to the PC platform. And fierce competition in this space is forcing the major players literally to give away pieces of their VM server software.

Why the hot market? For IT, virtualization lets multiple operating systems and applications run on the same box, making it easier to provision new servers as necessary and make more efficient use of hardware. This continues the consolidation trend that began several years ago with blade servers: Think of virtualization as the ultimate result, where many individual servers can now run on the same piece of hardware rather than on individual blades. You save space, you save time, you simplify your IT support structure, and you save plenty of money reusing the same gear.

But there is more to VM than server consolidation. EMC, for instance, has already established some prebuilt virtual machine appliances that come with ready-made applications such as Web, e-mail and database servers that IT can install and have running in minutes--further reducing the time to build out new servers. "We plan to use virtual server management to reduce our server support efforts, minimize downtime and reduce the ongoing costs of server replacement, enabling us to support more hardware with existing staff," says Karen Green, CIO of Brooks Health System.

"Two years ago, it wouldn't have been possible to handle [such a heavy] workload in a data center. Now we can, thanks to this new virtualization software," says Wienholtz.

Read the entire article, here.