How do virtualization and Grid relate to one another? As enterprises increasingly leverage virtualization techniques (IDC is reporting more than 60% growth from last year) – that’s a question I’m increasingly fielding these days. Virtualization is not in of itself a complete solution to how enterprises manage their resources. However, it does provide great capabilities in managing and moving operating systems (and the full software stack supporting a given application) onto different hardware resources. As Steve Tuecke, CEO of Univa says:“From a technical standpoint, virtualization does two things extremely well. First, it allows you to run multiple workloads on a single machine with great isolation between those workloads. By providing this hardware-level abstraction and strong isolation between multiple host operating systems, if one workload crashes, the other can continue to run unobstructed. The second great value of virtualization is that it’s great at suspending, resuming and migrating images around an IT environment, in run-time. Without even shutting down an image, you can move jobs to new machines without any sort of disruption in performance.”Like Grid, virtualization is a trend that’s being driven by economics. Rather than having to overprovision on the hardware side to meet peak demands, organizations can use virtualization approaches to get better utilization out of existing (underutilized) hardware. It’s also worth noting that virtualization is possibly on its way to becoming a mainstream approach to managing network resources. According to David Martin, Program Director, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM:“In the next generation of Grids, applications will not necessarily be designed to run on a certain piece of hardware or on a certain network – but will be written to consume certain types of resources, which could be provided anywhere on the network. To do that, we need more dynamic networks than we have now, and the virtualization efforts in the networking community are already pointing the industry in that direction.”And not surprisingly, some of the most interesting progress around virtualization is happening in open source. I’ll share more thoughts on that tomorrow. Technology Industry