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Real benefits from: Virtual architectures

Rajesh Rege
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Rajesh Rege
Businesses today face a growing, and increasingly complex set of challenges in the datacenter. This includes system availability, resource utilization, energy efficiency, regulatory compliance, and expectations of the empowered user. Globalization is leading to increased dependence on IT and requires the consolidation of assets. Therefore, previous business continuance (compute and storage) models are neither adequate nor economical in today's heterogeneous business environment.

Organizations need to adopt more advanced and cost-effective approaches to accommodate growing data within the confines of shrinking budgets, while increasing the utilization of existing datacenter assets. In order to ensure business continuity organizations must embrace new age technologies like virtualization which increase datacenter efficiency by aggregating hundreds/thousands of highly-distributed servers into relatively few, more easily-managed, centralized servers. Fewer physical servers means reduced power and cooling costs, savings on server hardware and related maintenance over time and better IT responsiveness.

Deployed in servers, storage, and networks, virtualization of datacenter resources helps organizations to turn non-performing assets (with the exception of a disaster) into an ongoing available asset that will function in a distributed scenario and achieve maximum reliability/performance regardless of location. With virtualization, organizations can do data replication and upgrades on a more-frequent basis; increase overall uptime and time-to-market for services. Slowly virtualization is becoming the standard for how organizations design their IT resources for the future.

Challenges enroute

Like every ‘big’ technology, virtualization comes with a fair share of challenges. This includes complexity, lack of technical expertise within organizations, capacity planning, and usage of virtualization features. Virtualization often requires a significant investment in new hardware and software and involves a lot of behind-the-scenes details/ processes for managing virtual servers. If done in pockets, virtualization can have unintended consequences that limit its effectiveness, create complicated and potentially costly, security and regulatory compliance concerns.


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