CIOs: Virtualization ready for prime time

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Speaker: So I want to talk about virtualization and is it mainly in dev, mainly in dev and test? Is it moving into production? Are you beginning to look at it as a technology to support disaster recovery? Your disaster recovery site, maybe, is a bunch of virtualized servers so that you just spin up the capacity that you need? So related question to clouds, but it really -- is virtualization ready for prime time or not? And if not ready for prime time, are there some missing technologies or capabilities that need to be developed and delivered where it could be core for production rather than dev and test and more context or less important applications? Start with Matt.

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Speaker: So yeah, it's production. We're using it in quite a few places. In fact, right now we're piloting it and using it our store, back office, so, you know, we better have it monitored and managed and the till set around it. So it seems we've had to build a little bit of that ourselves, but overall it seems to run. We've got good experience with it. It's pretty proven. I mean I think a lot of people run it. And so, you know, it's prime time.

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Speaker: You know what? I think that virtualization, where it's applied, at least in our firm, focuses much more on unpredictable peaking, so that you have the ability to just get capacity. You know, your point about speed of carving out environments in order to do things very fast, where you want to bring them up and down, has been something that we've done for awhile. I think virtualization at the server level is what we're talking about. We are spending a lot of cycles around virtualization on the desktop because we're trying to solve a lot of problems, like external collaboration. And people always say, "Well, what does virtualization on the desktop have to do with external collaboration?" Our ability to bring on, quickly, partners that we can quickly bring into an environment for a set period of time with our level of security, and then toss them back out, and them want to work with us and it's not -- virtualization of the desktop is not some big financial cost play. It's not, you know, "Wow, I don't have to buy computers for people." You know, that sounds like a really cool idea. Or I can use a Mac instead of a PC-based environment. It's much more about doing things very, very quickly and having opportunities and being seen as an organization that you want to collaborate with, that have a set of process already set up from a technology environment, where you can come in and go out. You don't have to burn an image into and give them -- and yet, we're using and working on all of the same tools, so we're -- that's more of an interesting focus for us, on virtualization as opposed to the server environment.

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Speaker: Yeah, I think that the -- Los inaudible became heroes a few years back by just doing server virtualization, saving a lot of resources and so on. I really think that has moved on to the agility, to focus on the agility, and exactly what you were talking about, that the ability to spin out a new engineering workstation in a matter of minutes instead of weeks is -- makes a huge difference. And also to be able to, like you were saying, to snapshot a whole bunch of different environments and really, very fast, be able to cycle back and forth between different environments and create them in different situations, both internal and external to the company.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====