Four Stages of

Virtualization "> Dessau reports seeing companies approach virtualization in four stages.

"The first stage is simplification—virtualizing similar resources, consolidating servers or storage devices, to manage them as a single thing." According to Dessau, this represents about 90 percent of the virtualization market today.

Second, Dessau said, is virtualizing at the application level, which may involve combining unlike resources, to be managed as one, e.g. using a tool like IBMs Dynamic Infrastructure (IDI) for mySAP Business Suite. "Those customers often end up with islands of virtualization."

Third is doing virtualization across the whole enterprise. Rather than connecting islands of virtualization, suggested Dessau, "the answer seems to be rethinking the whole infrastructure."

And lastly, accessing external virtualized resources, such as processing utilities.

"Start by simplifying your server environment," Dessau advised. "Make sure the complexity is taken out of what youre doing today."

Yet to be addressed, he added, is how system virtualization will change the culture of IT, the way that storage virtualization has already begun to.

Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer based in Newton Centre, Mass.)