Virtualisation of data centre goes mainstream

Virtualisation – an approach to IT that pools and shares resources so utilisation is optimised and supply automatically meets demand – has this past year moved beyond emerging technology to mainstream adoption. Widely identified as a key enabling element of the next generation data centre, virtualisation is critical for any organisation transforming a traditional IT environment into one that's characterized by automated 24x7 lights-out computing.

The viability of virtualisation for servers and storage is no longer debated because of its strong benefits, including greater flexibility to respond to business needs, reduced costs and improved service levels. Early adopters have also focused on virtualisation as a means of reducing costs through consolidation.

Similar to physical environments, virtual environments require a level of management in order to protect resources and data and mitigate risk. Not broadly understood in the debate about the risks of virtualisation is the extraordinary value virtualisation can provide from a business continuity/disaster recovery. According to IDC's virtualisation maturity index, organisations are just starting to leverage the technology in a proactive manner and reaping higher than expected total cost of ownership savings in this area.

Traditionally, the highest level of disaster recovery protection has been achieved by physically duplicating everything in the data centre at a separate location. This "copy" of the data centre would sit dormant until there was a failure at the primary site. While highly effective, this active/spare site approach is costly and difficult to justify from a return on investment standpoint – especially for smaller organizations.

Virtualisation, when combined with the right management tools, provides a compelling alternative. Because it separates applications from the physical layer and allows for the sharing of computing resources.

Manageability is key to successfully leverage virtualisation for improving business continuity. Customers should thoroughly explore the options for management tools whether they are in the planning stages for virtualisation, re-evaluating existing virtualisation strategies, or somewhere in between.

Some servers offer electrically isolated partitions so if one section fails, the others can continue to function without disruption. Additionally, software tools can automatically assess when servers need additional resources and adjust virtualised server capacity in real time, alleviating potential bottlenecks and slowing of systems due to over-provisioning. This "goal-based workload management", a VSE feature, ensures real-time adjustments to maintain service levels for critical applications. The resulting flexibility and higher levels of availability provide IT with an ability to support dynamically changing business needs like never before.

Successful implementations of highly available virtualised environments require considerations beyond servers and manageability. In particular, data protection and access must be considered as well. Business continuity requires access to both IT services and corporate data. Data protection, delivered through robust storage solutions, is the connective glue that ties everything together.

The most important thing to remember when developing a virtualisation strategy to enable business continuity is that there are a lot of options – the right solution will depend on where the IT environment is today and where the customer wants to take it in the future. Vendors should review the customer's individualised data centre goals from a business outcomes standpoint such as response times or new application/ services roll out times and offer technology options to help deliver what the business needs. For major implementations, customers should ask whether there is proven architecture that has been pre-tested. Customers should insist upon a solution that has simple, centralised administration capabilities.



- The author is the Middle East Director for Enterprise Storage and Server Group at Hewlett Packard