Q) What does virtualization means?
A) On the information technology world the word virtualization has different meanings. Usually virtualization refers to machine virtualization, particularly the virtualization of the operating system that works on the machine itself. Essentially virtualization systems allow to host an operating system inside another operating system (potentially different) without needing to use many physical machines. We can say that it's a sort of emulation, but much more powerful.

Q) What's the use of virtualization in my company?
A) Many things, even though this technique has normally the goal to consolidate the company server cluster. Essentially many or all the production servers (mail server, web server, database server, file server, etc) can be migrated to one or few physical machines. This has the immediate advantage to maximize the use of production machines processing capacity, minimizing managing costs (electric power, disk space, air conditioning, security, etc). Moreover a virtual machine can be migrated much faster from a server to another limiting the maintenance time needed and allowing more complex ways of backup. There're many other advantages offered by the virtualization, these are just the main ones.

Q) I've heard a lot about Linux. Can it be useful for my company?
A) Of course it can, but not for everything. Linux is quite suitable to be used on servers, above all to implement security and networking services. On these last year we're using it also for other applications and our customers are really satisfied.

Q) How can open source systems guarantee my company?
A) First of all open source software can be modified autonomously, as the source code is supplied with the product itself. Apart from this (changing the code of software can't be done by everybody) you should consider that many open source software are supported by organizations composed by commercial software companies. Many times from the open source product is developed a commercial version of the same product with support and assistance services.

Q) Does open source mean Linux?
A) No, not necessarily. Open source software has the peculiarity to be distributed under particular licenses that allow to supply and modify the source code. This doesn't mean that open source software can run just under the Linux platform, even though the most part of open source projects are born for this platform. In these last years many open source projects for Windows have been started, many by Microsoft itself.