A New Name for a New Time: Introducing Virtualization & Cloud Review

Regular readers of Virtualization Review will notice something different about the site today. Namely (see what I did there?) that we have a new name: henceforth, we are Virtualization & Cloud Review. Rolls trippingly off the tongue, doesn't it?

I'm excited about the new name, despite the length. It's a long time coming, but is a necessary tweak. We needed an updated moniker to reflect our evolving coverage. We still cover virtualization, of course; all aspects of it, as always. But the role of virtualization has changed dramatically over the years, and we needed to address those changes.

When I was the founding editor of Virtualization Review, way back in March of 2008 (has it really been nine years?), virtualization was the new kid on the datacenter block. It had an air of mystery about it; most IT folks then couldn't have told you what a hypervisor was, what it did, or why it was important.

Now hop in the DeLorean and fly back to the present. Hypervisors are deeply embedded in datacenters, and are mostly a "set it and forget it" technology. Virtualization, though, has grown by leaps and bounds, into most areas of IT-related infrastructure.

Today, virtualization is still at the forefront, but in a different capacity: it enables most of the cloud to work. Through technologies like software-defined networking and storage, hyper-convergence, containers, application virtualization and so on, the cloud sits on a foundation of virtualization. Here's how I've been describing it lately: if cloud computing is the house, virtualization is the plumbing. You don't have one without the other.

Our coverage has changed over the years to reflect this new reality, and our name needed to similarly change. It's growing increasingly rare to read an article here that doesn't touch in some way on the cloud, whether private, public or hybrid. We write about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, VMware's various cloud efforts (like VMware Cloud on AWS), and more. If it's cloud infrastructure-related, we're all over it.

That doesn't mean we'll be forgetting about virtualization. Take a look at the new title: Virtualization remains front and center, and will remain so. But now, our title better fits our comprehensive coverage.

Virtualization isn't going anywhere. Neither is cloud computing. Neither is the new Virtualization & Cloud Review. Let me know what you think of the change: like, no like, or no care?

Posted by Keith Ward on 03/07/2017 at 11:27 AM