During Bob Muglia's Keynote address at TechEd North America 2010, he talked about the many benefits organizations can gain by moving to the cloud. One thing he talked about was how an organization can scale services through shared hardware. This allows for self-service capabilities, as well as accelerating the speed of delivering applications.
There are three different core models enabled by the cloud: a new hardware model, a new applications model, and a new operations model.
In the new hardware model, hardware becomes very standardized and purchased in larger increments, which lowers the costs and spreads out the purchase cycles letting them become more predictable.
The new application model is designed for scaling and availability. Using the new application model, you can expedite application creation and integration into your existing environment, lessening time to value and rapidly increasing capabilities.
The new operations model changes how we stage and deliver these applications, whether it involves one or hundreds of servers. This helps transform how you deploy these types of applications at scale.
Mary-Jo Foley wrote about this at her blog, and talked about how Server Application Virtualization (which was mentioned first at MMS 2008) will be "a potentially powerful tool for moving legacy applications into the cloud".
Server Application Virtualization will be a strong enabler that should dramatically simplify the deployment and management of Data Center applications, without requiring a rewrite. It will both lessen the time it takes and simplify the deployment and upgrade of an application or service, whether in your datacenter or in the cloud. You will have less base OS images to manage and update, and when you need to update your images, you can quickly recompose the application onto the updated server image. If the application itself needs to be updated, you can do so quickly and redeploy it across your farm. Whether this is your front end web tier, your application layer, or the backend database, by virtualizing the application you can gain the operational benefits of decreasing the administrative burden for these workloads.
Taking this a step further, IT can now create custom application models and allow a Business Unit to deploy these services on their own, allowing the business to proceed on their time-line while maintaining control of the underlying infrastructure. This delegation will decrease the bottlenecks a business unit may encounter when trying to respond to business directions, while also showing centralized IT to be more agile and flexible, and able to meet the demands of their customers.
I am excited by the possibility of Server Application Virtualization, and of what it will bring in the future.