Catching up with the leaders
By Leslie Faughnan
For several years, the IT trade has been asserting firmly that “virtualisation is now’‘. But virtualisation is quite simply the way we do computing.
Like many other steps up and forward in technology, many organisations and users have yet to catch up. But starting from scratch today, very few would design the systems for a new business in any other way.
There is also a much more mature attitude to virtualisation in ICT general ly.
Server consolidation, for example, is the usual first step – and almost universally the primary driver – for adoption. Reducing a physical server estate to a tenth or less of the total number of boxes is extremely attractive on cost grounds. When it offers greater manageability with better performance, the deal seems a no-brainer.
“We know that the journey from physical to virtual typically starts with server virtualisation project, but more and more we find that virtualisation has already started to become a broader infrastructure discussion,” said Karl Jordan, Hewlett-Packard’s country manager for enterprise storage.
“Virtualisation is enabling companies to improve utilisation for computing, networking, storage and even management.”
But there were potential problem areas related to storage, he said. One of the issues was storage growth, because the whole growth model was different in storage to support virtual servers.” Server virtualisation introduces the need for more capacity than ever, and it all must be easily sharable as you move VMs around,” said Jordan.
“Investing in more storage may cancel out some of the cost savings from consolidating server infrastructure, although it can be offset with highly efficient utilisation and improved performance.”
He said performance was another area of concern.” With up to 20 VMs on each server, the I/O and throughput model is completely different,’’ Jordan said.” That workload needs to be dynamically balanced across the storage subsystem for optimum performance.”
