How I made "Virtualization" a reality

Sometime last year I attended this session that was hosted by Hardware Tech Gurus. Lucky me, I get to do these things once in a while (Yawwwwn!). Everyone who was anyone came up with something or the other that they claimed would change the way we would work and it will be the next best thing after the invention of the wheel. A revolution of sorts. But the one thing that everyone agreed upon as a great useful concept was something called Virtualization. It Seems that virtualization is a great leap ahead in data storage. And there was a valid reason that the Hardware gurus to be excited about it. And that is the amount of data being added is growing by the second in terms of terra bits. Interesting!

Another interesting fact: It seems that 50,000 people log on to the internet for the first time, every day!

So considering the amount of traffic and the volume of data you have, its not surprising that the hardware is simply not able to scale up to the required level. A study indicated that 8-10% of the power generted in the US today is used by these servers. Massive! So the great computer engineers came up with this concept of virtualization. If you ask me what this means, I would be at a loss to tell you because I myself could not understand enough of it. What I understood though was, that it makes a single physical resource appear to function as multiple logical resources. Or make multiple logical resources appear as one. Yes. Duh! To me it sounded very much like Michael Keaton's movie Multiplicity where he duplicates himself to do different chores around the house. Simply put, this is in a way similar as what you would do if your home PC's disk got to near full capacity. You would have to either delete some files or add another disk to add more stuff. Since data in servers is sacrosanct and cannot be deleted just like that, hardware engineers add more disks (at different physical locations) and spread the data across multiple disks. But when you access this data you never would know that you are accessing info from multiple storage areas. Amazing, isn't it?

And I am proud that I've had a miniscule role to play to make this thing exist from being non-existent. How? You might ask. Go ahead, ask. Simple. By writing this blog. You see, just as tiny drops of water make an ocean, in the same way millions of people like me who store all this worthless information (which no one reads) on others' free servers. So one fine day the servers do not have enough space for storing important data like your friend's anniversary, pics of your ex, pics of your present, videos of us doing goofy things, your favorite music, the forwarded joke (which you would never read but will store for eternity thinking you'll read them someday), etc. This has led to a crisis of sorts in the computer world.

To resolve this very crisis, scientists had (didn't have a choice, did they) to come up with ideas of creating storage spaces out of thin air (now you see the connection? "virtual"ization as in "virtual"?). So now I revel in the fact that in reality (or in virtuality or virtual reality or virtual whatever) my data might be stored in different computers across the world but is still accessible at my finger tips. Just like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces fall into their respective places the moment you command them to. Some technology this! Want to read more about it (I mean virtualization)? Just google and you'll get enough information that'll fill up a couple of terrabit servers to their overheated gills. Happy Searching!