If you know what cloud based computing and the Internet of Things are, you probably remember a time when the terms were eye-rolling buzzwords rather than concrete, tangible resources. You can likely recall the grayscale IBM commercials pushing the concepts in the mid-2000’s when there was a marked effort to educate the world about the coming sea-change in how we connect devices and use this new, omnipresent connectivity to do more, better. These campaigns are designed to demystify concepts rather than obscure them because there is a recognition that the more people we have who understand a tool, no matter how abstract or intimidating its technical term is, the more useful it becomes to us all. If there is one term right now that fits this bill, it would be “virtualization”. Manufacturing Business Technology, IMPO ‘s sister site, has some great resources on the technical ins-and-outs of server virtualization in manufacturing ( here and here ) but, and this is coming from a boots-on-the-ground at facilities perspective, there is still a sizeable chasm in owners and operators comfort with and understanding of the concept of virtualization. Virtualization in its most basic form refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, typically a hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or computer network resource. These complete virtualized instances, called a virtual machine or VM, act like a real computer with an operating system; they simply operate as an instance on whatever machine it is hosted on. Everything executed on these machines is separated from the underlying hardware resources of the computer they are hosted on. Think of it this way: virtualization allows you to run a complete computer including the OS, hardware, and software, as a single, standalone application on another computer. So why exactly does this matter […]