Interest in virtualisation is rising rapidly as companies struggle to reduce the costs of running large data centres while at the same time try to increase their performance.

According to industry analyst firm IDC, virtualisation will cause significant changes to the way in which large companies store and manage their data.

"In the past several years, storage trends have tended to be tactical and focused on developments in specific technologies," says IDC enterprise storage systems vice president Benjamin Woo. “2008 is likely to represent an inflection point in the way applications and storage will be interfaced."