Virtualization

The book I read to research this post was Virtualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Moore's Law states that in the computing world processing power doubles every 2 years which basically means if you are a computer user you have to buy a new computer every 2 years. Anything which helps you upgrade less often has to be a good thing. Virtualization does just that. The most common virtualization is server virtualization where particularly with hard drives the price per gigabyte has plummeted. What would at one time have been on separate servers can now be put on one server. You still need a spare though in case one crashes. The beauty of client servers is you can set up an account that limits what the user can do on that client pc then use that for going on the internet & if it gets infected by a virus the damage it can do is severely limited. This book was released prior to the release of windows server 2008 which was due to have virtualization features included so the information on virtualization products is a bit limited but I think VMware which is featured in the book is still one of the major players in this field. Another aspect of virtualization is cloud computing or software as a service a good example of this is google search where you enter a search term, googles many servers process your request & send you the results. Can you imagine how long your home pc would take to do the same job? Salesforce.com is probably the most well known cloud computing service although there's many companies getting in on the act. With cloud computing only a minimal amount of processing is done on your computer because most of it's done on the service providers server. Another aspect of cloud computing which has been pioneered by IBM is charging people & companies according to how much use they make of a cloud computing service which I think is fair & has potential.