VMware believes every business can be like a Google, and have a data center that is highly efficient and automated -- and eventually so completely virtualized it operates not as a collection of networked machines but as a living organism.
VMware expects 14,000 attendees at its annual user conference in Las Vegas this week, including workers from more than 200 trade-show exhibitors. That's a 30 percent increase over last year's attendance -- clear evidence of VMware's influence. But VMworld 2008 will also be the focal point for the gathering storm of competition that the virtualization market leader faces.
If you're an IT executive, chances are you're already thinking about storage virtualization. Nearly one-quarter of companies with at least 500 employees have deployed storage virtualization products already, and another 55 percent plan to do so within two years, a recent Gartner survey found.