5 most surprising things about cloud computing in 2010

That doesn't mean the people running the servers don't have to know their business, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. If anything, supporting clouds means making the servers, storage, networks and applications faster and more stable, with less jitter and lag than ever earlier, according to Vince DiMemmo, general manager of cloud and IT services at infrastructure and data-center services provider Equinix.

Virtualization enables many applications and operating systems to run on the same piece of hardware during thinking they each own the server themselves. The problem with that, according to IDC analyst Gary Chen, is that they all think they have the network interface and input/output bus to the processor to themselves, too.

Hotter topic

That's one reason Virtual I/O is becoming a hotter topic, leading to what Forrester analyst John Rymer calls "distributed virtualization" -- in which I/O, memory and other elements are abstracted from each other as so then as the guest OSes, and the definition of "server" changes to mean whatever resources an application needs right however.

Instead of standardizing on virtual desktops and moving all their users suddenly to make migration to Windows 7 easier, most companies adopted one of an increasing number of flavors of the innovation, however only in places where it made most sense.

Another was the increasing focus even inside the enterprise of tablets, smartphones and other non-PC devices that have to be virtualized to become secure, reliable customers for enterprise applications.

Lot about that from Citrix

"We're expecting to hear a lot about that from Citrix and VMware and a lot of the phone companies afterwards the first of the year," Song says. "It's going to be big."