So I emphatically agree that virtualization is not cloud – and this is why architects are seeking out technology-agnostic cloud management solutions that can allocate a variety of application workloads across any collection of hardware, operating systems, virtual machines, storage and networking. This is the only way to maximize existing resources and future infrastructure investments while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Virtualisation can mean different things to different people in different scenarios however placed in the hands of the marketing department the term becomes interchangable.

So you could argue that a cloud based service is virtual in that it lives “in the cloud” and not in your office. This has nothing to do with stuff like VMware.

But the problem is that the IT world went for a number of years without anything really very new.

VMware (and others) came along with something rather clever that met a real need however the marketing people (and others) hyped it to a level unseen for many years. In reality this kind of virtualisation is just a tool that meets some real IT challenges.

But the hype started.

So then along came the likes of Citrix who brought is desktop virtualisation (VDI). Again this got caught up in the virtualisation hype (with a fair degree of band wagon jumping) and suddenly a technology that Citrix (and others) had been pushing for many years was the next great thing again.

But just as the hypervisor was about to become a commodity, the cloud came along and again the marketing team saw a new opportunity and a way to save their margins.

Let us not forget that the biggest player in the hypervisor space is also owned by a company famed for the qualities of it’s marketing engine who have for many years been able to persuade big business to buy over priced disks that are no better than anybody else.

Virtualisation has many meanings however all those marketing departments have a vested interest to see those meanings all mixed together in order to maintain margins on something that should be a commodity.

Can you tell why a certain vendor has not invited me to San Francisco this week?

But consider the Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] cloud vendors. Do all SaaS vendors use virtualization? Most do and any one of them that needs to truly scale to huge server farms probably do. But the startups don’t need virtualization – they have more important issues on their mind. And it’s entirely feasible to buy a huge server and storage farm to support a few dozen multi-tenant subscriber companies without any virtualization software.

Let’s say that a business user needs a database for analytics (a data mart). Imagine a user fills in a browser screen with what they need and the application locates a server-storage pair to allocate it for them and hand them back a URL link. The user could then start proof of concept testing or sand box analytics, never knowing where or what the database is running on. This would be an internal private cloud service. The database itself is an abstraction somewhere out in a private cloud. Like the SaaS vendor, it could be one of a few dozen databases on one big server and storage farm. The database is a virtual concept, probably running on a multi-tenant server, all handled via self service capacity on demand. Some database products merely partition an existing database for multitenant and again, the user or developer need not know.

Virtualization is, of course, useful when managing huge server and storage farms. As cloud servers start scaling up, virtualization is often what helps IT preserve their sanity and keep costs down. I’m 100% in favor of virtualization. But I have to agree with the IBM comment. “Many people equate cloud computing to virtualization. It is not virtualization.”

But virtualization add another layer of complicity. That is why twitter and other high traffic system doesn’t buy it. In general, cloud computing price plan is higher than dedicated hosting, another reason for twitter to not go cloud.