Virtualization: In Search of IT Infrastructure El Dorado (from 'The Virtualizer' in Red Herring, Dec 2002)

Following two actions can help corporates cost-effectively manage their investments in IT infrastructure

a) Maximizing the utilization: Server utilization is only 40% of the total installed capacity - in other words, upto 60% of an email server's total power can potentially be exploited to perform other tasks, like intranet hosting or even printing. (IBM study)

b) Minimizing the maintenance cost: A company pays $1 per megabyte to acquire hard disk storage, but must cough up an additional $8 per megabyte each year to manage that storage (a study by Strategic Research, a tech research firm)

The concept of 'Virtualization', a partitioning technique that enables multiple and independednt operating systems to use a single set of resources, can be a powerful solution to address these issues. Based on this concept, a 'Technology Management System' console can be developed which will, for example, allow High-end Sun servers to co-exist with low-cost blade servers from Egenera and both types of servers to be called upon for computational tasks.

Virtualization appeared in 2000 in Storage industry to meet the need of companies to add new storage systems to their exiting systems while treating them as one virtual unit. As a concept encompassing servers, storage, networks and software, Virtualization can allow a coporation's IT infrastructure to exist as one seamless unit. In the words of Steve Duplessie, analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group, "Virtualization enables the infrastructure to become 'liquid'--able to react to unknown requirements."

Some IT companies' initiatives to leverage upon this opportunity -
Sun - NI
IBM - Projects eLiza and Oceana

Permalink, (0) comments

Post a Comment