Five’s IT head is seeking board approval for the
roll-out of
virtualisation technology in the
broadcaster’s operations, following the success of its initial
implementation.
But challenges remain around internal acceptance of the
resulting consolidation as well as capacity planning, according to
analysts.
In 2006 the UK’s fifth terrestrial television channel
implemented VMware’s virtualisation technology for
application testing and soon followed up with the technology for
its disaster recovery.
The power, space, time and cost savings that resulted were
enough to convince Ken Davies, head of IT at the broadcaster, that
virtualisation should be used across the company’s infrastructure.
Currently 25 servers have been virtualised on three physical
servers.
He said the virtualised environments have reduced costs,
increased space and the benefits of it are easy to explain to
directors. “I do not want to go to the directors and talk about
virtualisation but the benefits to the business,” he said.
The benefits are clear to Five but moving into operational
environments will present challenges. Chris Ingle, analyst at IDC,
said there are risks in any migration. “However most IT directors I
have spoken to have not experienced major problems and for many
this is a very simple process,” he said.
Ingle said some typical issues must be resolved. “For example,
proper capacity planning is needed to ensure that the physical
server is able to handle the load of the virtual servers
consolidated onto it. “
He added that there can be internal resistance to doing this
kind of consolidation.
Bob Tarzy, analyst at Quocirca, said virtualisation is an ideal
technology in the storage environment for a company such as Five,
which stores large amounts of rich media. “But moving the
technology into other environments is always challenging because
despite testing you cannot tell how it will work until it is in
live environments,” he warned.
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