IT

Virtualization emerged as an area of interest in IT earlier this decade and is now unarguably one of the hottest trends in IT at the moment.  Prior posts explored the technical details of how processor virtualization and I/O virtualization function.  But what are the uses of virtualization that are driving all this attention and interest from IT, vendors and the press? 

The most important use today for virtualization is server consolidation.  During the late 1990’s and early part of this decade, small rack-mounted x86 servers proliferated rapidly.  In part, this was due to the low cost of x86 servers using Linux or Windows, compared to their UNIX predecessors.  But this was also driven by the flakiness of the software stacks on those same servers.  The software and operating systems were not nearly as robust as they are today and it was problematic enough that a lot of IT staff considered isolating applications from one another a best practice – even if it lead to low utilization.  There were plenty of peculiar bugs that resulted from a combination of corner cases in the OS and different software packages and using a server dedicated to a specific application avoids that problem entirely.

The proliferation of small, underutilized servers was slowed down by the dot-com bust in 2001, but also by constraints on data center space, cooling and power.  Cooling and power were particularly sensitive, because while Moore’s Law means that you can get more computing power in a chip over time – it also means that the power density (whether it is W/cm² or W/cm³) increases substantially.  So a data center designed for 1995 servers is wholly inadequate for those in 2003.  Worse yet, data centers are incredibly expensive to build or redesign – for many companies there is a bit of pain as your data center approaches 80% capacity and the cooling or power system gets stretched.  But typically, building another data center is far too painful and expensive to be an acceptable solution. Read More »

Unless you haven’t picked up a business magazine in the past eight years, chances are you’ve at least heard of Enterprise Risk Management. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re intimately familiar with it.

Not to be confused with that other ERM familiar to IT types (Enterprise Resource Management), risk management falls under the umbrella of yet another acronym that’s reached buzzword-status among IT managers: GRC, short for Governance, Risk and Compliance. After all, what has taken down some of the greatest names in business recently? Lousy governance, failure to predict risk and sloppy adherence to regulatory requirements.

Proactively and prudently managing these challenges, which include an assortment of technology-related risks, has become part of the financial responsibilities that make up fiduciary duty.

What’s more, scenarios that several years ago may have seemed outlandish to most businesses – a terrorist attack or a calamitous natural event — now warrant straight-faced consideration. In a post-9/11 world, overlaid with threats of rapidly shifting climate patterns, it seems that nothing can be ruled out. Read More »

There’s no question, virtualization has matured nicely over the past few years. Recently, with data center battle-tested products like VMware, it has become a key enabling technology for an even broader scope of markets. For the data center and enterprise, the benefits of virtualization are numerous and obvious. The need for high availability platforms that scale on demand has paved the way for larger, application-aware and multiple OS capable architectures. In addition, server consolidation to provide efficiencies in power consumption, maintenance and other overhead costs, has become critical. There are lots of other areas where virtualization reduces costs and provides efficiencies, including cooling, application/OS testing and associated man hours, as well as reduced backup, security and OS software licensing fees. For many in the enterprise, virtualization is a virtual no-brainer. In fact, many current business models in IT wouldn’t even exist without virtualization today. Read More »

Could virtualizing your company’s servers actually be part of your patriotic duty? It may seem a little far-fetched at first glance, but let’s take a deeper look at national trends and the important take-aways from recent national political campaigns that drew a bead on our country’s most pressing problems: a teetering economy, our alarming dependence on foreign oil, and a growing need to address environmental concerns such as global warming.

Is there something IT professionals can do that has the potential of addressing this triple threat of social, economic and environmental ills? The answer could be virtualization. Proven technologies that allow a single server to take on a variety of unrelated tasks that would normally require the use of multiple dedicated servers offer some obvious benefits in the areas of cost savings and efficiency. Can those benefits also translate into improved fiscal performance, reduced consumption of energy resources and a lower carbon footprint? The consensus seems to be in the affirmative. Read More »