Virtualization is only the first stage of the transformation of the data center architecture, says Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe in his latest Professional Alert. The next stage, he says, will be close integration between the private company cloud and the larger Internet-based Cloud that will allow workloads to shift not just between servers inside the data center but between the data center itself and outside Cloud services.

A consultant and former CIO, Lowe also suggests that CIOs will want to create different levels of internal virtualization, for instance virtualizing the most demanding Tier 1 applications and data on VMware and less demanding loads on the less expensive Microsoft Hyper-V, creating a multi-tiered infrastructure. He envisions a future architecture in which, “depending on any number of factors, workloads can run on vSphere, Hyper-V, Xen, in a private cloud environment or in a public cloud environment such as Amazon or Azure…. Workloads can seamlessly migrate from Hyper-V right to Amazon where they simply continue to operate.”

Software tools are already appearing to support this kind of future. For instance, he says, Microsoft System Center 2012 includes Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, which enables migration of workloads to and from Windows Azure. VMware’s vCloud Director includes the APIs for integration with various Cloud services. BMC and other vendors provide comprehensive management platforms that can extend to integrate Cloud services.

These newer management tools provide workload abstraction opportunities that can free the data center from the single hypervisor, local or Cloud restrictions to allow tiered architectures with full integration between multiple hypervisors internally and out to external service providers. To take full advantage of these expanded possibilities, CIOs and their staffs need to start viewing the data center as “but one object in a series of options” in a fully integrated architecture that allows the organization to achieve the best price/performance for each IT service and workload.

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