Imagine waking up to find that there is no internet, computers don’t work, smartphones don’t work. Once the initial shock wears off, you get out of bed to get ready to work and realize that there is no electricity, you can’t turn on the water to shower or the stove to cook, you can’t even use your electric toothbrush. Why? Because everything runs on technology, and you can’t function without it.

However, your nightmare ends when all systems are restored and you are left with the realization of just how dependent you are on technology.

The Tech life

Technology affects people all over the world. Advancements in technology have made our lives safer and easier. For instance, branchless banking, smart cars, smart TVs, lightning fast computers and more play a vital role in our lives, making it easy to get things done. While everyone uses tech, most people are not aware of what goes on at the backend. One of the important aspects of the backend system is virtualization.

What is virtualization?

Virtualization relies on software to simulate hardware functionality and create a virtual computer system. This enables IT organizations to run more than one virtual system and multiple operating systems and applications on a single server. The resulting benefits include economies of scale and greater efficiency.

In millennial and Gen Z language, virtualization is the technology that drives cloud computing economics – an example of this is Google Home, Alexa and Chrome Cast.

The concept of virtualization came about in the 1960s-1970s in the mainframe days when leading hardware vendors invested a lot of time and effort in developing robust time-sharing solutions. When we talk about time-sharing, it means shared usage of computer resources among a large group of users, aiming to increase the efficiency of both the users and the expensive computer resources they share.

This was a major disruption in computer technology – when software vendors took charge in the late 1990s and reintroducd the idea of virtualization with robust features, the cost of providing computer resources capability dropped considerably and it became possible for organizations, and even individuals, to use a computer without actually owning one.

If we take a closer look at the virtualization industry, we will find similar reasons: the capacity in a single server is so large that it is almost impossible for most workloads to effectively use it. The best way to improve resource utilization, and at the same time simplify data center management, is through virtualization technology.

If we talk about the world of data centres, experts have started using virtualization techniques to make an abstract of the physical hardware, create large aggregated pools of logical resources consisting of CPUs, memory, disks, file storage, applications and networking, and offer those resources to users or customers in the form of agile, scalable, consolidated virtual machines.

Even though technology and user cases have evolved, the core meaning of virtualization remains the same: to enable a computing environment to run multiple independent systems at the same time. So let’s try to understand how we can leverage the concept of virtualization technology in our daily lives.

If you go to an app store, you will see a myriad of applications with their metadata. You download and use those applications on your mobile devices but in reality, the applications must be hosted in a seamless virtualized environment at the backend. This is just one good example to understand the technology of virtualization. There are tons of areas where we are leveraging virtualization to make our lives better.

Published at The Business Recorder