Virtualization: What's Old is New Again, Kind Of

Back in the day, the computer sitting on your desk wasn't a computer at all. Mainframe terminals of the day ran very simple client software designed to simply connect, receive and send information, all in glorious shades of, well...just green. In fact, little of the horsepower was local, but resided inside a data center far away...sort of, like...I don't know...a cloud? Sound familiar?

These days, "cloud computing" and virtualization are the focus of many IT shops around the country as companies search desperately to cut costs and reduce IT assets. Both technologies lend themselves towards a model in which processing occurs in a central location, typically a data center, but often "cloud computing" refers to the utilization of a specific application, while virtualization refers to the execution of the entire operating system. Make no mistake however, while these technologies are suddenly popular in the age of Kanye West...the ideas themselves are straight up Doug E. Fresh. However, virtualization has come a long way, vendors such as VMWare, RngCube, and MokaFive have turned old school virtualizaion on its head, allowing central management of operating system images, while the processing itself occurs on the client's end point machine. The genius here is that you don't have to be connected to the local network (or any network) to get data to and from the VM, hence the ability to run VMs anywhere, anytime.

Recently VMWare announced that they've taken it a step further with their Mobile Virtual Platform, which obviously has the awesome acronym "MVP". When initially announced, the platform was a touch vaporware, as we saw no working prototypes to speak of. That all changed this week at VMWorld in Europe, as details surfaced on the platform itself, including video of a phone running both Android and Windows Mobile via the MVP client software. With current phone specs heading toward the stratosphere of performance, VMWare has timed this introduction well. A platform of this type could allow developers to reach an extraordinarily larger audience, and may allow consumers to focus more on the hardware when choosing a phone rather than the operating system. In addition, it brings carriers and companies who support these devices one step closer to a device agnostic mind set, one in which we the consumers have a much greater level of flexibility in our purchasing choices. And to think, it all started with a mainframe terminal...luckily we have more colors this time around.