This crowd ruled the datacenter for a long time, but virtualization in the datacenter is now driving a radical shift that seems to be changing everything.
However even with datacenter developments such as compression, virtualization and deduplication the costs of on-line storage exceed that of local storage and the performance of on-line storage is significantly less than local storage.
VMware focuses on the virtualization they know from their datacenter background with a vision to bring cloud, virtual desktop and application delivery together under one product.
The benefits of keeping data in the datacenter, combined with advanced security features have propelled virtualization to be a top business initiative.
But Cisco's vice president for datacenter technology, Jayshree Ullal, argues that the benefits of virtualization may produce cost savings fast enough to please stingy IT managers.