Optimisation through virtulisation

Saumya Upadhyaya of Frost and Sullivan explains how companies can get the best out of virtulisation technology.

“Since its introduction, server virtualisation has been growing at a rapid pace. Enterprises with large server farms are expected to increase adoption and benefit the most out of server virtualisation”
-Saumya Upadhyaya, Frost & Sullivan

Enterprise computing is expected to do the same amount of work, if not more, irrespective of the business environment that the enterprise operates in. However, with budgets on a downslide, enterprises are exploring means to improve the utilisation levels of their current technology assets to cater to their mounting infrastructure needs. Enterprises across the world are aiming to transform their rigid data centres into agile environments, which can provide rapid scaling and sharing of

infrastructure resources. Over the years, enterprises have built up silos in infrastructure, often leading to over provisioned, unmanageable infrastructural components. Virtualisation enables these enterprises to benefit through better use of existing resources, agility in deploying new environments, a significantly smaller hardware footprint, and thereby a reduction in the cost of computing infrastructure resources. It assists IT administrators to optimally exploit resources and achieve significant costs and business benefits.

Virtualisation in action

Globally, virtualisation has long been portrayed as a technology that would change the dynamics of enterprise infrastructure. Virtualisation is shaping up to be one of the major trends that would influence the end-to-end infrastructure of an enterprises namely server, storage, network, application, desktop and so on. The ability to consolidate disparate infrastructure elements, increase utilisation levels and minimise the mounting space and power expenditures are a few of the key drivers for the adoption of virtualisation

solutions. Enterprises having large computing infrastructure are the first to adopt virtualisation owing to the benefits that consolidation brings to space, power and cooling expenditures. Server virtualisation is the forerunner in the adoption of virtualisation, primarily because of the visible benefits of consolidation, reduced operating expenditure, and limited impact to user operations. Since its introduction, server virtualisation has been growing at a rapid pace. Enterprises with large server farms are expected to increase adoption and benefit the most out of server virtualisation. When implemented the right way, virtualisation has a proven record of providing considerable reductions in direct infrastructure costs, indirect costs such as optimised IT infrastructure performance, business continuity and stability, as well as capacity management. For

instance, power consumed by servers and cooling systems could be reduced by up to 60 percent to 70 percent and the space requirements reduced by a factor of the number of virtualised servers per physical server.

Similar to server provisioning, storage infrastructures across enterprises are over provisioned due to storage silos created by different business units within the same organisation. As a result, typically enterprises buy almost double of the amount of storage they actually need. Storage virtualisation would help organisations achieve a more efficient centralised management for their storage and data replication needs along with enhanced security of enterprise data. Storage virtualisation solutions enable enterprises to increase their storage efficiencies from 25 to 30 percent to almost 80 percent. With such an increased utilisation rate, organisations can delay the purchase of additional storage hardware by using existing storage to meet increasing data demands and consolidate IT assets.

Barriers to wider adoption of virtualisation

In-spite of its benefits, virtualisation is not necessarily easy to adopt. Concentrated risk, increased infrastructure complexity and migration challenges to a virtualised environment are a few of the key restraints for adoption of the virtualisation solution. While a well-executed virtualisation strategy can bring significant benefits to the organisation, an unplanned strategy could create manageability issues. Organisations need, therefore, to have the right networked infrastructure to extract the true benefits of the

technology. A holistic view of all the organisational assets is required as implementation of virtualisation impacts organisational business and operational processes. Virtualisation should be viewed not merely as an IT decision but as a strategic decision, the benefits of which can be accrued over a period. The implementation planning should start with a thorough assessment of technology assets and IT infrastructure along with the supported business processes and then calibrate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track the benefits.

A big bang approach to virtualisation can easily be a recipe for disaster. Organisations typically start with virtualisation of single infrastructure components such as only servers, only storage, only application and so on. While this provides organisations with flexibility of upgrading systematically to a completely virtualised environment, virtualisation at different levels of the IT infrastructure also poses a manageability issue. Virtualised applications may suffer from lack of resources due to outages and multiple levels of virtualisation make it difficult to isolate the problem to a certain level of virtualisation in the scope of the entire infrastructure. As a result, organisations require

clear planning of their virtualisation upgrade strategy to enable end-to-end management of their virtualised infrastructure. End-to-end virtualisation orchestrates various levels of virtualisation providing the ability to recover from failures within minutes, thereby achieving high efficiency, productivity and cost savings. End-to-end virtualisation helps in eliminating virtualisation silos and uses end-to-end failure automation practices to detect failure and recover from the outage by fixing or replacing the affected device from the network.

Consolidating infrastructures

Infrastructure consolidation, followed by virtualisation, is a key trend currently witnessed in the market. With controlled capital expenditure across the board and virtualisation solutions becoming increasingly affordable, virtualisation is set to become a mainstream technology in the coming years. As virtualisation enablers such as hypervisors become increasingly commoditised,

virtualisation management solutions and end-to-end virtualisation solutions are increasingly becoming a key focus area for a number of enterprises and virtualisation vendors. With enterprise focus moving from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model, virtualisation serves as an enabler for cloud computing; this enables everything from IT infrastructure to software to be provided as a service. Enterprises could choose between internal clouds with sharing across business units or external clouds that facilitate the pay-per-use model. Virtualisation is the building block of any robust, flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud service. Without virtualisation at server, storage, and network levels, infrastructure sharing and cloud computing would be a distant reality. In essence, virtualisation spanning across the organisation's IT infrastructure, that is, from the data centre to the desktop, enables enterprises to

create a dynamic IT environment capable of catering to the rapid scaling of enterprise computing requirements. In addition, the benefits accrued on the Total Cost of Ownership of the enterprise IT infrastructure make virtualisation an appealing investment for enterprise decision makers.

Saumya Upadhyaya is Industry Analyst, Information and Communication Technologies at Frost and Sullivan. For more information contact tanu.chopra@frost.com.

This article was first published in CXO magazine.