EMC at forefront of data revolution
By Leslie Faughnan
EMC is probably the world’s leading data storage specialist and majority shareholder in VMware, so it has an authoritative view of virtualisation in operation.
“Virtualisation offers many benefits and poses some technical challenges. But the salient feature of data storage still is the speed of growth,” said Gerry Boyce, chief technical officer of EMC Ireland.
Annual growth of data in organisations often runs from 40 to 60 per cent. “Virtualisation will not reduce the amount of information you have to manage,” Boyce said.” In the virtualised world, that means the infrastructure combination of servers, storage and network has to be flexible, even elastic, yet fully control led.”
That is the rationale, he said, behind the Virtual Computing Environment coalition that brings together the specialist expertise and market leading positions of EMC, VMware and Cisco.” A data centre in a rack” might be the shorthand for the results of this collaboration.” We are effectively talking now about the virtual data centre almost as an appliance,” said Boyce.
“At a higher level, there is a clear and easy path to the virtual private cloud. The concepts in virtualisation have always been easy. What we are now seeing is the seamless knitting together of solutions to the technical challenges, right across the ICT infrastructure.”
Something of this new thinking is echoed by Andrew O’Kelly, business solutions director of Eircom.
“With the need for anywhere, anytime computing on demand, we are moving towards network-based computing. There is a range of functionality all the way from, for example, the virtual desktop or thin client to business continuity and disaster recovery where data and applications are immune to specific points of failure.”
That meant, O’Kelly said, that a key infrastructure requirement was an extremely robust and available network.” That is where Eircom has a potentially huge part to play in underpinning the smart, resilient network connectivity that is now demanded.”
In Dell Ireland, head of enterprise solutions Kevin Swan also took the view that what was happening was a generational shift in computing of which virtualisation is conceptual ly of enormous importance.
“But, when it comes to the delivery of effective systems for the efficient enterprise in 2010, it is just one component.”
Virtualisation took off in Ireland in recent years, driven largely by IT people who saw the value of the concept and incorporated it in their plans and business cases.” Today it is really the financial directors and CFOs who are making the decisions,” Swan said. “They grasp virtualisation but are also looking across the board at applications and people, uptime and maintenance, risk and return.”
That total business case is key to today’s market, Swan said, and since Dell has global experience of enterprises from about 20 to perhaps 20,000 employees is in a special position to assist.” Virtualisation projects take longer in larger organisations, for instance. They are not necessarily more complex but there is literally more of everything, from applications in use to varieties of current equipment to people and what they need for specific roles.”
Avery large proportion of Irish business has not yet done anything significant in virtualisation, in the view of Joe Molloy, head of managed services in consultancy and support company IT Focus.” We will see a lot of activity in the next year or 18 months, not least because the recession has unearthed a lot of legacy inefficiencies, tired systems and areas in which investment could save money or boost performance.”
There is still a lot of educating to be done, Molloy said.” It is perhaps easy to explain and sell how virtualisation can reduce the number of physical servers with their higher operational costs. But the ease and cheapness of an effective business continuity solution in a virtualised environment is something that tends to be got across only in the detailed discussions. Yet it is one of the great ongoing benefits.” Molloy said that at this stage there was such cumulative experience of virtualisation in the IT sector that late adopters essentially would go straight to the state of the art.
“It has happened often before in IT, although virtualisation has not been one of those movements where the early adopters got burned or singed. Today, the virtual desktop is recognised as perhaps the final piece that brings in the full set of benefits. This year’s projects will see many go straight to the completely virtualised enterprise infrastructure.”
