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.
The growth of server blade technology has increased rapidly over the last couple of years. There are many reasons as to why this is so, not least among them the financial (savings) gains that can be made.
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.
Feedback from ComputerWeekly readers has suggested that there are two key management issues affecting the working lives of CIOs, heads of IT and IT Directors: aligning IT with the business and reacting to downward financial pressure.
Such factors are keenly felt when senior ITR management has to manage large PC estates that reside in all enterprises.
There is no doubt that one of the key topics in the IT industry right now is virtualisation.
In short, virtualisation is a technique that enables organisations to pool their essential IT resources into one flexible and manageable entity.
