Page 138 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

look like two or three years from now. Only 16 percent of data
center applications or “workloads” have been virtualized, ac-
cording to Gartner. Thus, much of the market remains up for
grabs. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of data center work-
loads will be virtualized by 2012, so this picture is going to
change.

All this competition to establish a dominant virtual file for-
mat is actually an indicator that cloud computing encourages
open standards. In another bid to increase virtualization of
servers with Microsoft’s Hyper-V, not only has Microsoft
teamed up with Citrix to back VHD, but it has also promised
that VHD will remain an open format, not subject to changes
that leave the customer faced with the need to upgrade to a

new product and subject to new license charges. It does so
with a nonbinding but highly public statement: its Open Spec-
ification Promise.
The pressure of VMware’s current virtualization domi-
nance has prompted Microsoft to adopt a stance of being
more open than VMware on the virtual machine file format.
The Open Specification Promise is different from actually
putting a specification in the open under the authority of a
standards body. Nonetheless, having some guarantee of open-

ness, regardless of how it came about, is preferable to having a
purely proprietary spec. Microsoft’s stance, and its growing in-
fluence with Citrix Systems in the virtualization market, may
one day force VMware to follow suit with a greater openness
on its VMDK.
What’s most important here is to realize that business
users’ virtualization choices will end up guiding their cloud

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