All About Data Center Virtualization Software 

Take me to the bank, Pat Sajak! Oh wait, that's the wrong TV show. You know what? TV is so 1990s. Let's look at Facebook, specifically at the process of uploading pictures to your Facebook account.

Have you ever thought about where your actual photos are stored once you upload them? Probably not but here's what happens. Facebook uses an abstraction layer to store your photos once you upload them. This abstraction layer is a crucial component of what is referred to as Data Center Virtualization Software. 
 
Currently Data Center Virtualization Software is used in tandem with physical data centers. You must first find the actual location of the photos you want to upload on to your Facebook account. Then you use a tool to upload them. Once this happens, you can access these photos without knowing the specific details, such as the physical location of the original file or files.

You love these analogies, don't you? Well, here's another one. Think of a hybrid car where an electric motor and a gasoline engine work together to make the car move. These two aspects are working together. So, Data Center Virtualization Software makes the need for tons of hardware in a physical location obsolete by working together with virtualization technologies. Many businesses still have the hardware but they combine it with virtual technology. At this point, you must be asking yourself, what a Data Center Virtualization is? Before you Google that, here is the answer...
 

What Is A Data Center Virtualization Software? 

 
Before we understand that, let's first understand what data center virtualization is doing exactly. Data center virtualization is a process where cloud computing and virtualization technologies are used to design, develop and deploy a data center. This process mimics a physical data center. Operating systems, networks, storage, central processing units, security and servers are all examples of what can be virtualized. 

While there are still actual physical machines involved, they're spread out instead of centralized in one location (the opposite of Facebook - those guys have data centers bigger than some small towns!).

Data Center Virtualization Software provides the virtualization of a data center as a service. As simple as that! You want to know how data center virtualization became part of our regular life? Let's look at its history. 
 

Where Did Data Center Virtualization Software Come From?

 
Buckle up as we take a stroll down memory lane. In talking about the history of data center virtualization, we will need to go back to the early 1980s. Modern data centers came into being in 1981 with the emergence of the personal computer. If we fast forward to the late 1990s, we will find Virtual PC by Apple and VMware Workstation coming onto the scene. These were 2 of the earliest virtualization software to pave the way for Data Center Virtualization Software. 
 
In 2007, Sun Microsystems introduced the modular data center. This data center was portable and was built into a 20-foot shipping container. The rapid deployment of 280 servers was possible with this data center, which cut costs immensely for businesses that didn't want to invest in more real estate for traditional physical data centers. 
 
Now, let's skip down the road a bit to 2011 and talk about Facebook and the Open Compute Project. This project was launched to increase energy efficiency while at the exact time cutting costs and in 2011 was made available to businesses everywhere. 

Even more recently, in 2013, Google spent over 7 billion dollars towards expanding its global data centers. That's a lot of moolah, sports fans! Today, the need for physical hardware and other physical aspects of a data center has become obsolete thanks to Data Center Virtualization Software.
 

How Does It Work?

So, to get an idea of how Data Center Virtualization Software works, let's break it down. A Data Center Virtualization Software virtualizes physical servers that exist at a physical location. That means that these virtual data centers are used in lieu of physical data centers. Virtual versions of networking, data center and storage are produced, making a virtual data center.

Among the varied reasons businesses like virtual data centers, the one at the top of the list would be that this means less physical hardware and fewer servers being used, which means companies save energy and cut costs. Talk about cost-cutting!
 

Types Of Data Center Virtualization Software

Now, let's delve into the different types of data center virtualization products that you will run into. 
 

• Server Virtualization

  Here, a physical server is divided into different isolated virtual servers. The cool thing is that each virtual server can run its operating systems independently.

• Storage Virtualization And Availability

  As the need for data storage grew over the years, there came storage virtualization solution. Here, the software and hardware layer exist between servers and storage systems. This eliminates the need for applications to know precisely where data resides.

• Network Virtualization

  A network overlay is created where virtual network layers are run separately on top of the same physical network. Reconfiguring the network is not needed for virtual machines to move across domains.

• Security Virtualization

  This is the virtualization of network security that is usually hardware-based. This type of virtualization technology works within a virtualized IT structure or environment resource. Virtualized security is more dynamic and flexible than hardware-physical infrastructure-based security. 

Now that you have some information on the several types of Data Center Virtualization Software, let's look at the needs and the benefits of Data Center Virtualization Software.

How Does A Data Center Virtualization Software Benefits You?

First off, virtual data centers are more flexible than physical data centers and they also work faster, making the need for tons of hardware, other real estate and infrastructure unnecessary. Data Center Virtualization Software saves businesses a lot of money in maintenance costs. This, in turn, also means that the management of big data is simplified.

Virtualized data centers are also working on the pay-per-use model, which means a company or organization only pays for the resources they use as they need them, making the whole operation much more efficient. Another benefit is that security is better for virtualized data centers than for physical data centers.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As far as the future of data center virtualization is concerned, it seems as if we are going towards software-led infrastructure. That means that automation, software-defined storage, networks and server virtualization will combine to create the ultimate virtualization platform of a data center. Data centers existing solely on the cloud service are also on the horizon. Some of these technologies are just in their infancy, so it will be exciting to see how they develop in the coming years. 
 

Closing

 
Data Center Virtualization provides a means for smaller organizations to have a state-of-the-art data center without having to shell out a ton of money. Security is better and energy efficiency is increased as well. Now that you've learned a bit about Data Center Virtualization Software, where it's been and where it's going, perhaps you will begin to utilize this technology for your business if you haven't already. 

Until next time!