Thomas Bittman

This comes from the 27th Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, which opened at the MGM Grand Conference Center in Las Vegas: virtualization is proving to be a disruptive trend for server and storage vendors, according to Gartner analysts.

“Virtualization should be seen as not just a tool for (server) consolidation, but as a modernization catalyst,” said Thomas Bittman, a Gartner VP and Chief of Research for its Infrastructure and operations area. “It’s changing how we deal with the business.”

As DataCenterKnowledge points out, Bittman foresees the emergence of a “meta operating system” – a virtualization layer between applications and distributed computing resources that will play a central role in the next-generation data center.

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Gartner says virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

From the press release (emphasis ours):

“Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.”

According to Gartner, the leading edge of this change is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized capacity of existing server architectures. Server virtualization is already having an impact on the server market; Gartner believes that virtualization reduced the x86 server market by 4 % in 2006. As hypervisor prices drop sharply and management costs decrease because of increased competition, virtualization will have a significantly larger impact, and Gartner analysts predict that more than 4 million virtual machines will be installed on x86 servers by 2009.

The use of PC virtualization is also set to increase rapidly. The number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. On the PC, the decoupling technology that breaks the close ties and dependencies between hardware and software occurs at two levels: between hardware and the operating system (machine virtualization) and between the operating system and applications (application virtualization).

Check out Gartner’s special report on virtualization, including a number of useful guides and a podcast with industry analyst Thomas Bittman.