Virtual Confabulation

It was probably inevitable: With so much talk of virtual this and virtual that, there had to come a time when the line between virtual and real blurred alarmingly.

It happened to this editor today, during a con call with a vendor that shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say that at one point midway through the online PowerPoint presentation, it wasn't clear whether hardware, software, or both were being virtualized.

"But I see hardware here in this picture. Isn't that supposed to be virtual?" I queried.

"Yes, but to get virtual, you need to have the hardware," the vendor replied.

Needless to say, I'd failed to grasp exactly what the supplier was supposed to be virtualizing. And that made me very uncomfortable.Maybe it's me. No doubt, most storage engineers wouldn't be as challenged to find the virtualization in the vendor's diagram. Still, with talk of application virtualization, desktop virtualization,

desktop virtualization brokers, and storage virtualization, not to mention file, I/O