Thu, September 15, 2005 — CIO —

During the past few decades, CIOs have stood at the center of one of the great technological revolutions in history: the replacement of the physical atom by the computational bit as the medium of commerce and culture. The profession might be forgiven for thinking that nothing is left for the next generation but tinkering. What could compare with a transition like that?

Actually, something almost as big might be coming over the horizon: the replacement of the bit with the virtual bit. Virtualization is the substitution of physical computing elements, either hardware or software, with artificial impostors that exactly replicate the originals, but without the sometimes inconvenient need for those originals to actually exist. Need a 1 terabyte hard drive, but only have 10 100GB drives? No problem, virtualization software can provide an interface that makes all 10 drives look and act like a single unit to any inquiring application. Got some data you need from an application you last accessed in 1993 on an aging MicroVAX 2000 that hit the garbage bin a decade ago? A virtual Digital VMS simulator could save your skin.

Stated like that, virtualization can sound like little more than a quick and dirty hack, and indeed, for most of the history of computing, that is exactly how the technique was viewed. Its roots lie in the early days of computing, when it was a means of tricking single-user, single-application mainframe hardware into supporting multiple users on multiple applications. But as every aspect of computing has grown more complex, the flexibility and intelligence that virtualization adds to the management of computing resources have become steadily more attractive. Today it stands on the lip of being the next big thing.

Raising the Dead

The Computer History Simulation Project, coordinated by Bob Supnik at SiCortex (see "Immortality for Aging Systems"), uses virtualization to fool programs of historical interest into thinking that they are running on computer hardware that vanished decades ago. Supnik’s project has a practical end as well: Sometimes old systems are so embedded in the corporate landscape that they must be kept running. If the real hardware is unavailable, the only way to keep the old machines running is to virtualize them.

In a more contemporary example of the power of virtualization, about three years ago J. R. Simplot, a $3 billion food and agribusiness company in Boise, Idaho, found itself in a phase of especially rapid growth in server deployments. Of course, with rapid growth comes the headache of figuring out how to do everything faster. In this case, the company’s IT center concluded that their old server procurement system had to be accelerated.