Virtualization started in the data center as a way to boost utilization and cut costs dramatically, cutting the number of boxes needed to support operations. Early case histories provided dramatic stories of companies able to add years of live to their data centers and in some cases cut the number of data centers they needed drastically. Then with the advent of cloud computing and private as well as the public cloud, virtualization is playing a key role in supporting much greater agility, giving IT the ability to shift resources at lightning speed – often hours rather than weeks – and much lower expense, to meet changing business demands.

However, two top executives from Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks group, speaking in an interview with Wikibon.org founder and CEO David Vellante on Siliconangle.tv from VMworld (http://www.siliconangle.tv/video/hps-dave-roberson-and-paul-perez-vmworld-2010), said that virtualization is also playing other roles in terms of unifying data operations and changing the very paradigm of data center computing. And it is also going to have a major impact on the organization of the data center and require that the technicians who run virtualized environments learn new, converged skills.

At one level, said HP storage executive David Roberson, virtualization is solving a perpetual problem for hardware vendors like HP and their customers. “Just because you have a new generation of products with improved technology, you can’t tell customers to throw out their older generation stuff,” he said. “For one thing, they can’t afford it.” The result is that new equipment always has to be backwards compatible, which can put a crimp on forward-looking design. But virtualization provides a new, hgher-level answer to solving that problem. By virtualizing the environment, IT can make close integration across generations of servers, storage devices, and the like, much easier to accomplish and hide the differences from applications, data, and higher-level functions.

However, says HP storage executive Paul Perez, under the surface virtualization is having a revolutionary impact on one of the basic paradigms of the data center. “The old model was taking data and piping it through a network to be available to applications. The new model is to bring the virtualized applications to co-reside with the data and run it there. It’s a lot more efficient and a lot higher performance.”

This is the logic behind the new unified stack products being brought to market by HP, Oracle, Dell and other major IT players. “It allows the bringing together of these elements with a simpler management paradigm, which we’ve done, making it much more cost-effective,” says Mr. Roberson. And this has wider implications for the staff running IT.

“Traditionally we’ve had storage administrators, network administrators, server administrators, database administrators. In the new, virtualized world, those people need to become infrastructure admininstrators at some point.”

The focus of this new class of IT technicians changes as well. They are more focused on higher-level issues such as policies, use cases, and data protection. “Some of our clients are realizing this and saying, ‘Our IT organization needs to add new skills.’”