By Clive Gold, CTO Marketing, EMC Australia and New Zealand.
Unless you were under a rock this week you would know that vForum was on in Sydney, and it was HUGE! I’m going to drill down into a couple of areas but here is a quick take of my thoughts:-
– This part of the industry is on-fire! I have never been to a local IT event with over 5000 people there, with lots of logo’s I do not recognise and a general buzz that indicates something is happening.
– Hypervisors are nowhere near commoditised! I had a developing impression that the basic hypervisor wars were over and there was general agreement that they were a much of a muchness. How wrong was I, look under the covers and ESx is the only ‘bare metal’ architecture, this thin approach means less security risk, less baggage, and better outlook for the future. Think about a post general operating system world.
– Management built for the virtual world is here! The VMware management suites are worth a look at. They close the loop on infrastructure management and also now address areas like database lifecycle management. The new ‘paradigm’ (sorry), to the world of IT service management is here. You just have to love a management screen that just has three dashboard numbers on it! Also a drill down that says in how many days you will run out of a certain resource!! Like a car, a fuel gage that says how many km you have left in the tank.
– Consumer’ising Enterprise IT- Lots of talk about the post-PC era and there are two things to look out for, Appblast…which turns any application into HTML 5. That means any device anywhere! Secondly the last session I went to the presenter asked how many people were using dropbox… about a third of the audience… then he asked, ‘how many of your companies sanction the use?’, all but two hands went down!! He then introduced Project Octopus, (www.vmwareoctopus.com), a converged social, email, repository and messaging platform for the enterprise. (Now I understand why VMware took over the running and development of Mozy!)
Lastly, the event kind of felt like ‘home’, lots of people you know and have worked with in past lives all there. Some faces you recognise and others you had to look at their name badge for their current employer as well as their name. Just one big happy family this IT industry of ours!
Clive Gold 
Operating systems have long relied on the fact that through clever memory management, only the useful subset gets loaded. This allowed them to build bloated, feature rich operating systems, which were able to run in limited RAM environments. With the proliferation of servers in an organisation suddenly we don’t care about how little of the OS is resident in memory, but we start caring about the disk footprint as we still need to find space for it, back it up etc.
I agree that the future seems to be virtualisation one level up, application virtualisation, where we encapsulate and move lightweight applications from place to place, instead of the heavier weight of the entire operating system (which we are forced to do at the moment)
I agree and I’m also questioning the future role or requirement for the traditional OS. If the hyper visor/cloud operating environment managed the physical resources. And a ‘framework’ executes directly onto this layer. Them the Java/Rails/Python applications become the light weight containers being provisioned, managed and moved.