Red Hat has been outlining why virtualisation "will provide the next disruptive episode in the march of Open Source." In virtualisation, a virtual machine is utilised, which is an environment which appears to a "guest" operating system as hardware, but is simulated in a contained software environment by the host system. Red Hat believes that this is the key to better exploiting underutilised computing resources.
Red Hat's new CTO Brian Stevens said many of Red Hat's top grade customers are reaching the upper limits of how much computing power they can physically cram into their premises, yet are painfully aware that they are often only using half of those resources. Consequently, the next move is an expensive one: build another data centre somewhere else.