First step to the cloud
The software market has seen profound changes in the last few years, not least because of the rise of virtualisation. This has prompted organisations of all sizes to consolidate and find new ways of saving money in the data centre.
After a slow start, Microsoft is central to this revolution with Hyper-V, virtualisation software that comes bundled with Windows Server 2008.RonanGeraghty, business manager at Microsoft Ireland, said it was a vital first step – not just to cost cutting, but to cloud computing.
“Phase one is about the benefits of consolidation, moving from the traditional one application per physical server and the associated waste of resources, to the virtualised data centre. Typically people will see a return on their investment in six to nine months,” said Geraghty. “The next step is the private cloud, where organisations begin to treat IT as a service that’s delivered back to the business.”
The cloud provides a more flexible platform for supporting a business, said Geraghty, enabling organisations to scale up and down, adding more processing power to support peaks in the business cycle. “It’s about becoming an asset for the business, being more agile at the same time as squeezing more cost out of the business.”
Another benefit of a virtualised environment is disaster recovery. “It’s not just about faster times to recover – which can be hours as opposed to days – it’s about how to avoid an outage in the first place and ensure better availability.”
Microsoft also sells a suite of tools, System Center, to help manage the environment. “Management is key to reducing ongoing operational costs. With System Center, you can monitor your asset from the physical hardware up through the operating system to the applications layer, and all the way to the desktop. It can be very efficient with a high density of servers running on a single box,” said Geraghty.
Microsoft has also started to explore software-as-a-service, mostly through partners who sell the Microsoft BPOS suite as well as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Customers buy it from a cloud service provider on a pay-as-you-go basis that also saves on licensing costs.
By 2012, IDC predicts that 25 per cent of new technology spending will be invested in the cloud.
