iWeb Tech News Highlights

iWeb reports from VM World

Published on September 5, 2012 at 3:23 pm by Sam Turner in: iWeb Tech News Highlights

As leaders in innovation, iWeb couldn’t miss the chance to attend one of the world’s biggest IT shows, VM World, which took place in San Francisco from August 26-30.

Focusing on discussions around virtualization, cloud solutions and the future of information technology, the event filled three halls in the Moscone Center, housed dozens of innovators and technology leaders, and welcomed thousands of IT specialists from around the world.

VM World San Francisco - right here right now poster.

VM World in San Francisco

In amongst the crowd, delegates were eager to discover and discuss what is around the corner in the IT market for 2013 and beyond. With five days of sessions and labs, there was plenty to keep people interested and inspired. Two recurring themes throughout the conference were the latest developments in cloud computing and the implications of post-PC hardware for businesses and organisations.

Debating the hybrid cloud

Ten years ago, most people looked at virtualization with scepticism, but today most tier-3 and tier-4 applications are virtualized and major players like Microsoft, Citrix and VMware are well established in the field. So with virtualization now taken as given, attention has turned to the cloud. More precisely, the private cloud.

A new take on the already popular public cloud environment, the private cloud targets all the advantages of cloud computing while seeking to create a more controlled infrastructure in order to tackle certain security problems that showed up during the evolution of the public cloud.

The big question when creating a private cloud infrastructure, which was fervently debated at the conference, is which elements need to be public and which need to be private. This mix of private and public – known as the hybrid cloud – incorporates instances of the public cloud within the fabric of the private cloud to quickly achieve as many of the desired advantages as possible. For example, disaster recovery and the creation of an on-the-fly, scalable solution for high traffic peaks.

The post-PC era

In the post-PC era, tablets and smartphones have quickly become essential business tools, empowering users to work and communicate in a more convenient and efficient manner than ever before. This has important implications for the people responsible for leveraging the benefits new hardware can deliver.

As well as offering flexibility to the end user, the ability to incorporate heterogeneous platforms into a solution also offers IT departments more flexibility when looking at organizations’ many requirements. These days, tablets, smartphones and laptops can be sourced, mixed and matched from different vendors, and different equipment provided from one employee to another depending on their particular needs.

For business IT, this complexity opens up both opportunities and challenges. VM World provided ample opportunity for delegates to get informed about the possibilities and start thinking about how to tailor access and applications to individual users while ensuring that critical data is secured from falling into the wrong hands.

As a showcase for ever-expanding horizons and opportunities, VM World provided the healthy combination of lots of ideas and little consensus, with the exception of the common sentiment that these remain exciting times for IT specialists. With such a growing interest in the private and hybrid cloud, it will be intriguing to see the evolution that takes place between now and next year’s conference. As ever, only time will tell.

By Eric Sarault, B.Eng @VMWorld2012

VM World Europe takes place October 9-11 in Barcelona, Spain.