Recent research from Gartner has suggested that for organisations, virtualisation will be the highest-impact trend-changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.
Key drivers are a much-needed simplification of the business infrastructure, the drive towards Green IT, and let’s face it, for many, a sheer naked drive to consolidate resources and increase efficiency. But whatever you’re trying to virtualise – whether it is storage, servers or desktops - it has to be managed effectively.
Businesses and public sector organisations alike face increasingly complex IT operations, as they aim to do more with less, improve service levels, and drive up efficiency through initiatives such as mobility, flexible working and collaboration.
As competition and availability of alternatives increase, customers demand more in exchange for their loyalty. Leaders are driven to seek innovative ways to offer a more consistent, responsive experience to customers without imposing additional cost.
IT departments are under huge pressures right now. Not only do they have to cope with supporting more business enabling systems in different forms in different places, the economic downturn has meant that they have to do so with increasingly cut-down resources.
Never has there been more pressure on today’s businesses to become flexible and adaptable entities better capable of reacting to changing market conditions. Organisations are trying to become more competitive by implementing mobile technology to enable more of their employees to work in a variety of locations.
After years of uncontrolled growth, many datacentres face a crisis as they run into space and power constraints. Even though remedies to the problems exist, current typical business practices concerning datacentres do not encourage the prioritisation of power reduction within one of the most power hungry areas of a business.
One of the fundamental technological dynamics of the IT industry has been to push the limits of technological performance further and further. Companies have come to expect regular step changes in price and performance of their fundamental IT and will readily invest in them to extract business advantage.
Cutting edge techniques such as virtualisation can help IT departments make the most out of their IT estate. But there’s an assumption here that the estates in question will be continuously available to users.
Over the course of 2007, the challenges facing IT departments and the servers that they deploy throughout their businesses has changed subtly. No longer is it enough for IT departments to deploy the best or most appropriate technological server solution; they also have to look at the wider business context of server technology deployment.
