Meeting Old Friends, Making New Ones

• By Keith Ward
• 08/22/2014

It's a little more worn now, but I'm pleased to announce that I'm back in the saddle of Virtualization Review. You old-timers may remember me -- I was the founding editor of this publication, way back in 2008. In those days, virtualization was a new branch of IT, full of possibilities, and bursting with innovation. I remember hearing the term "hypervisor," and having absolutely no idea what it meant.

Now, getting back into the game in 2014, I know what a hypervisor is. But one thing that's interested me as I've started researching the field after six years away is that some key things are still the same. For example, VMware is still the industry leader, and Microsoft remains a strong second, with Citrix and Red Hat doing really interesting stuff, too. In that sense, things aren't much different.

Innovation still rules this industry, too, which I'm excited to see. Back in `08, I was seeing new products introduced on an almost-weekly basis. That's still happening. That innovation, of course, also means that I'm way, way behind the trends and technology. That's good in a way; it means that creativity still drives this space. For me, though, it means I have a lot of catching up to do. Here are some of the things that weren't around back at the beginning:

• Cloud computing. Sure, cloud was a "thing" back then, but it wasn't well defined, and no one really had any idea what it was, what it could be. Although it's come a long way, I still find that it's an amorphous idea, with differing definitions of what it means. And cloud wasn't intimately tied to virtualization the way it is now.
• Software-defined networking. This is a prime example of how far behind I've fallen. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the concept, and how it plays out in a day-to-day datacenter.
• OpenStack. It simply didn't exist in 2008. Now it seems everybody's talking about it, and trying to get a piece of it.

Those are just a few things that have changed. There's lots more, and I look forward to exploring this strange, new world, which seems familiar somehow.