'Within a virtual data center the ability to use the storage system in a transparent mode for storage tiering, independent of vendor, should translate into cost savings,' said Leung. 'And in terms of infrastructure reusability, employing virtual layers of OS makes hardware transparent and enables fail-over to an entirely different infrastructure.'

'For JOS, 'data center virtualization' creates an environment where virtual servers and storage resources are logically pooled and consolidated for the efficient and optimized use of consolidated resources,' said Yeung. 'A common management framework provides data center management services to this logical pool of resources. Clients automatically receive the precise amount of computing bandwidth and power, storage and data center facilities for their applications, as if they existed in a discrete and isolated environment.'

'A virtualized data center makes use of virtualization across the storage, computing and network layers, while a virtual server is a server instance that is created by a process and a hardware abstraction from a pool of available computing resources. Servers in a virtual environment look and behave exactly as their discrete counterparts,' explained Yeung.

Chua explained that his firm's virtualization strategy is 'based on the abstraction or virtualization of server, storage, and network resources in order to make them available dynamically for sharing by Information Technologies services for our customers.'

'The power of [our] strategy...lies in the integration of open virtualization solutions, controlled by automated intelligent management software, to present a coherent, yet flexible, virtual computing environment,' he said, adding that Atos Origin's strategy 'is based on open technologies and does not lock you into any specific hardware vendor.'