Virtualization Or Cloud Computing? What to Opt For

Enterprises have been correlating Cloud computing and Virtualization. However, they are different layers of a comprehensive service. Virtualization can be seen as a key enabler for cloud computing. Physical and logical resources are made available through a virtual service layer across the enterprise. Both of them together will help in delivering optimized resources, on-demand utilization, enhanced flexibility as well as scalability.

As an efficient IT model, Cloud computing offers a cost effective way for enterprises to structure their data centers to make the most of server, storage as well as network resources. Cloud computing can extend virtualization across a wide area network (WAN) to put up a single virtual cloud data center. Since a cloud data center can have the servers and storage of multiple physical data centers, it has larger capacity to provide a larger pool of resources for applications to share than server virtualization. This would further lead to full allocation of resources and lower cost of ownership.

Initially, cloud computing was known to be implemented more as an outsourced or a hosted model and then slowly being adopted within the enterprise firewall as an architecture. Contrary to this, virtualization was started within the boundaries of enterprise firewall and then was utilized in hosted environments.

As opposed to the popular myth, Virtualization along with automation cannot always be regarded as requisite conditions to start with Cloud. The combination is referred to as the foundation of private clouds. Well, as cloud matures, virtual machines may disappear under the hood. You never know!

In the end, though, choosing between cloud computing and virtualization requires analyzing, evaluating and taking actions in present that would impact the future. Enterprises are required to outgrow their computing power and storage capacity. They need to assess their capacity needs in the next two or three years to choose the right capital investment.

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