By Bharath Vasudevan, Product Manager, HPE Software-defined and Cloud Group Altering the past to change the future is a fascinating concept that has inspired many fiction novels and movies. In Back to the Future II, Biff creates a completely different future for himself by using a seemingly meaningless item from the future (a sports almanac that reveals sports outcomes). I can’t help but wonder: what would happen if just one small, seemingly insignificant piece of our history were changed; how different would we be today? How IT Got to Where It Is For modern IT to exist in the form of hyperconverged infrastructure, composable infrastructure, and the cloud, we needed virtualization. Without virtualization, the nearly two-decade evolution of IT would have been far different. That evolution began when the first iteration of data center infrastructure was reaching its peak – as computers became common tools, mobile devices emerged, and IT leaders needed to manage the back end with better, faster services. In 2001, a then-little-known startup, VMware, set out to virtualize workloads using an abstracted layer in infrastructure to open up new ways of architecting servers and the data center itself. VMware’s hypervisor was an industry-changing innovation that would fuel a steady stream of advancements to the virtual workload over several decades and lead to the billion-dollar industry we know today. That billion-dollar industry of virtualization gave server administrators room to breathe. Virtualization made it possible for IT teams to work with what they had to get more capacity. It also allowed them to run multiple applications on a Windows server successfully without over-provisioning systems for peak performance requirements, and stop wasting CPU and memory resources. They could also view these resources and eventually move them within and among servers to match workloads. The Alternate Reality without Virtualization A world without virtualization begs the question of whether IT would be more or less advanced as it is today – an anxiety-inducing thought, but a well-founded one. Without virtualization, a legion of IT teams would be increasingly hampered by storage that is tied to applications, increased server farms, and clunky processes like backup. The relationship between hardware, software, and all their related dependencies would have suffered without the hypervisor causing a rise in different industry leaders. And the kind of data center insight and consolidation that came with integrated computing platforms like the cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, and composable infrastructure – which are necessary for modern IT – would be very different or may not have come to fruition at all without virtualization. It is unclear whether IT would have made equally large efficiency gains or have increased IT flexibility. Back to the Future of IT Despite the many alternate realities we could live in, we are thankful our reality is virtual; however, virtualization is not the end of IT development. While server virtualization is beneficial, it didn’t abstract storage from the virtual machine, causing inefficiencies and keeping storage provisioning a manual task. IT leaders need to discover a way to bring agility and mobility to the data center. Virtualization was revolutionary, but it didn’t actually address the problem of siloes we face today. Integrated computing platforms, which are at the core of any hybrid IT strategy, abstract storage policy from the infrastructure layer to bring real mobility to virtualized workloads. Such solutions are the next big step forward for IT as they consolidate and assimilate all IT below the hypervisor into a single, highly-scalable solution. This allows IT teams to bring automation, seamless provisioning, and true mobility to the modern data center. HPE’s hybrid IT model, which leverages many integrated computing platforms including hyperconverged infrastructure, is accelerating IT through a new phase of innovation with dynamic solutions that provide the raw compute power with the flexibility and scalability of cloud models in a single platform. Integrating simplified data management tools and data protection to this solution improves those efficiency problems we face daily, allowing for solutions like hyperconverged infrastructure to dominate the industry. Without the innovation of VMware and virtualization, IT would remain stuck in the same old cycles of traditional IT. Thankfully, the dream of virtualization did come to fruition and the development of the hybrid IT model – a specialty of HPE – was able to advance to the forefront of the industry to make the lives of IT administrators easier and more productive. To learn more about hyperconvergence, check out the free e-book: Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dummies. Technology Industry