Impact of Your Virtual Environment

The resurgence of virtualization
Demands on IT managers continue to grow. Each year the addition of new
applications and increases in processing power, networking and storage continue
to accelerate. At the same time, regulatory compliance demands more
and better data protection, and globalization has made readily available data
an indispensable competitive tool.
Unfortunately, these growing demands are not matched by the resources to
support them. IT budgets haven’t kept up with increasing application or storage
needs, and fewer people are having to manage more. Compound that
with limited data center resources such as floor space, cooling and power and
the challenges can seem insurmountable. With the worldwide economy under
increasing pressure, efficient use of assets is critical now more than ever.
Fortunately, advances in technology, including virtualization, are helping
address these issues. Virtualization, while not a new market, is clearly enjoying
renewed interest. Solutions such as server virtualization are being rapidly
deployed into production environments, giving organizations the ability to
consolidate compute resources. The applications residing on the servers
aren’t the only components of the IT infrastructure that consume compute
processing power though. Network and storage resources do as well. In fact,
the cost to acquire, manage and protect storage is one of the fastest growing
data center costs. As a result, a solution in one area, such as consolidating
compute resources, does not translate to efficiencies across other high-cost
areas such as storage.
Leveraging virtualization in server and storage environments can improve
utilization, reduce costs, and simplify management. A combined server and
storage virtualization solution will create a blueprint for effective consolidation,
optimization and protection of enterprise infrastructures.
Virtualize or not?
Barriers to adoption
With so much technological innovation and attention due to the adoption of
technologies like VMware, there is still much disagreement over how to
address virtualization. This is largely due to the number and complexity of
solutions and the fact that they cross multiple disciplines.
Internal barriers. Most organizations use a variety of applications running
on different platforms. Each has its own requirements for networking and
storage resources and may have different requirements for access and availability.
Geographical distribution can further add to the challenges.
.
Leveraging Virtualization to Consolidate, Optimize and Protect Your IT
Infrastructure