Image Credit: Google Young-Sae Song is a VP at AMD Virtualization, perhaps more than any other technology, is powering tremendous growth in cloud-based services. At its heart, virtualization is a hypervisor that allows the provisioning of virtual machines on a single piece of hardware. For cloud services the hypervisor is the key enabler for two reasons. Above: Young-Sae Song Image Credit: AMD First it allows the underlying hardware to be divided up, allowing some organizations to maximize their hardware utilization, and second, it provides a way of provisioning new services without having to be in the data room. The economic benefits of increasing hardware utilization are obvious; however, it is a single shot of efficiency. But the ability to provision services on demand is the feature which fuels the continual growth in demand for cloud services. On-demand provisioning, which provides users with an elastic infrastructure to meet the varying usage dema