Why Virtualization Will Transform Your Business

Introduction:

There are very compelling reasons for the transformation of any business. At this time in particular, when every dollar saved is important, Virtualization can get more IT service bang for each buck spent! Before we can understand why Virtualization can transform a business, we need to understand what Virtualization is all about.

Virtualization is the creation of virtual items out of some actual real resources. PC enthusiasts and IT engineers will have experienced this Virtualization whenever they have partitioned a hard drive into more than one partition thereby creating logical/virtual drives (not actual) out of that one physical drive.

When it comes to computing resources, there are some areas that are receiving close attention from businesses. These are the servers, storage and networks. Broadly, it is the servers and the infrastructure.

Virtual Servers & infrastructure:

The IT infrastructure is a mix of different kinds of hardware, software and operating systems. Whereas a user is interested only in getting his application to run, all these differences add to the burden. The IT department has the nightmare of deploying the resources, securing them and maintaining the facilities. The biggest struggle for IT managers is the availability of the resources for the users at a reasonably high level. Despite all the aggravation when they are able to maintain the servers up and running, the utilisation levels are abnormally low. 15% or less is the kind of utilisation most businesses achieve!You can hardly have resources lying idle at that level; that's a total waste of money! Natural question then is what can be done! Applications run in Operating System environments. Combine an operating system and an application into a container and you receive a package that can run on one machine - these packages are the virtual machines. Extending that concept a little more, one could have a software interface that virtualizes the resources of more than one server. You simply run the virtual machines on this bed of resources that is the data center of the organisation. The underlying storage and network resources also interact virtually with these virtual machines. This is the virtual infrastructure supporting the IT operations of your business.

Transformations are Irresistible:

Virtualization then presents irresistible opportunities. Lower numbers of real servers are required and each is better utilised:

Capital, administration and maintenance costs are far lower as a consequence.
With such a homogenous mix, the number of admin/maintenance people required would be lower too.
The immediate benefit: The Company has cut down on the need to have specialised people on board for special hardware.
Deployment of desktop resources is quick and easy and fewer support calls need to be handled. Utilisation that is typically below 15 % can go up to high percentages (60 to 80%). The IT department can have a standard server build that gets loaded and a server can be started quickly.
Availability increases as applications on a server can be moved to another identical one in case of a failure. Moving a virtual machine simply involves just starting the virtual machine copy on another machine.
Recovery times improve tremendously. Business continuity planning is easier and disaster recovery quicker.
Individual desktops need constant attention in terms of applying the upgrades and patches that keep coming. With standardised IT infrastructure, managing is done centrally and is easily manageable.

The Market Realises the Possibilities:

News/trends on Virtualization indicate that businesses realise these transformation possibilities. The Virtualization software market is predicted, as per a recent Gartner report, to grow by 43% from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009. The market encompasses server Virtualization management, server Virtualization infrastructure and hosted virtual desktops or HVDs.

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The reasons for popularity of Virtualization seems to be now self-evident.

Business benefits in focus:

Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO)
Enhances the flexibility and agility of deployment
Increases the availability and ensures business continuity.

As new hardware conserves energy, Virtualization also contributes to reduce your organisation's carbon footprint.