By Greg Ness (Infoblox)

One of the most powerful drivers of virtualization is the flexibility enabled by the decoupling of applications from hardware.  In essence that decoupling enables unprecedented flexibility, management and automation, all within the confines of virtualized local area networks (vLANS).  It is likely one of the most significant recent developments in the IT industry.

We’ve compared this decoupling to the rise of the steam engine more than one hundred years ago, but perhaps that vision wasn’t big enough.  The ability to automate the creation and inter-vLAN/offline movement of servers is so powerful that some have suggested that servers could become obsolete in emerging cloud environments.