Business does not care about virtualization.  Executives do not care about VMWare, IBM, Sun, and Microsoft.  The business cares about their business:  maximizing profits for the short and long term.  This is accomplished by focusing on and improving various aspects of the business and how it operates.  Each one of these can be improved upon with virtualization technology.

Ways to maximize profits:

• Reduce costs
• Increase productivity and output
• Be resilient to risk
• Attract and retain customers

Reduce costs

Many costs are incurred by IT departments.  These include money spent on electricity, hardware, staff support time, deployment time, and disaster costs to name a few.  Virtualization can reduce all of these expenses.  Virtual storage on SANs will only allocate storage used, making it easier to manage and increasing utilization of storage.  100% of allocated space is used instead of a storage manager having to juggle space between LUNs and decide whether to overallocate or manage storage more frequently.  Virtualization allows several server operating systems to be hosted on one piece of physical server hardware which increases its utilization.  All of those unused clock cycles and memory are now being utilized to the fullest saving real dollars by not having to buy a physical server for each system that demands a dedicated server OS.

Time of deployment for a new server drops from two or three hours down to fifteen minutes or less when cloning server or workstation templates in the virtual world.  With technologies such as high-availability and disaster recovery managers for virtual machines, there is unheard of uptimes and true business continuity, not just disaster recovery.  Less equipment means less energy used for redundant power supplies on each server.  This also means more servers per square foot in a data center, which means the data center doesn’t need to waste valuable real estate.

Increase productivity and output

With much shorter deployment times and decreased maintenance and recovery times, IT staff has much more time for projects and improving support of business units.  To the business this means less staff required to maintain more servers, or it could mean much more is accomplished in the same amount of time.  There is also a better perception of the IT department when the business isn’t upset about a server being down to long, taking too long to recover or deploy.

Be resilient to risk

Risk to the business can come in all forms.  One of the most obvious risks discussed with IT staff is the concept of “disaster recovery”.  Some firms have evolved this concept into one of business resumption or continuity, as if there is no pause or hiatus, and business simply resumes.  This advanced concept is certainly more of a reality now with HA or “high availability” technology.  Virtualization takes advantage of their resource abstraction to offer impressive HA features.  For example a physical server can go down, yet the application server marches on little or no downtime with no impact to the users. 

Couple the HA technology with snapshot or backup technology and the risk of data, system, or registry corruption is mitigated as well.  With various management front-end interfaces now available, an entire site can go down physically, but its data and features can be available virtually, either in the “cloud”, or with replicated HA virtual machines becoming active at a remote site.

Attract and retain customers

This may be the hardest part, but one that every business strives for.  Virtualization can help with this aspect by marketing their dominance in the first three categories.  By offering more product for less money with strong resilience to risk, your business becomes much more attractive to both customers and shareholders.

Virtualization Defined

Let’s not forget, virtualization is not just separating the operating system from the hardware, rather it is the abstraction of all resources.  This means adding a layer of abstraction between two resources.  There are several current examples, such as storage system from the storage used as in the case of virtual storage.  The most obvious is abstracting the hardware of a server from the OS and software of a server.  There are VLANs and VSANs, allowing for complicated network configurations without the complicated wiring of them.  Let’s not get boxed in to how “it’s always been”.  We need to move forward and expand the exciting world of virtualization and abstraction of resources.

 

Michael Kramer is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight from Michael Kramer and other experts, please visit www.insightcommunity.com.