Virtualisation has emerged as the key initiative in data centres, as companies look to reign in their energy consumption, improve business agility and cut operating costs through automation. Analysts the Butler Group believe that virtualisation will become the dominant technology in data centres over the next two years.
Infrastructure virtualisation uses specialised software to disconnect operating systems and applications from the hardware that they are running on. This means that physical servers and storage can be shared between multiple applications and operating systems allowing computer resources to be used more efficiently.
According to a Yankee Group survey of 300 large European enterprises, reducing infrastructure costs and improving server utilisation are the top drivers in virtualisation adoption. Flexibility, and faster server and application provisioning times are also important factors. The survey found that 40% of companies run their enterprise applications on a virtual infrastructure, with 50% planning to do so within the 2008.
The key benefits of virtualisation include: more flexibility in allocating computer resources; reduction of operational IT costs and better return on investment (ROI); improved IT service delivery; and lower energy consumption cost through better resource utilisation.
Aligning IT with the business
Virtualisation also supports the corporate strategy of aligning IT with the business. For virtualisation to succeed, it requires a change in the organisations’ IT and business culture. To be able to share resources effectively across all applications, businesses need to move away from business unit autonomy with their own resource silos, to a position of pooled resources across the whole organisation.
“Understanding what infrastructure virtualisation can deliver, and how it is delivered, is the key to IT departments’ successful evolution towards a more efficient model for deploying and consuming IT resources,” explains Roy Illsley, Senior Research Analyst with Butler Group. Virtualisation has been so successful in transforming IT, says the Butler Group, that many businesses who started with a cost-saving server consolidation exercise, have made IT virtualisation a strategic part of the overall IT plan.
Virtualisation is not only delivering IT cost savings – it is also helping reduce the energy demands of data centres at a key time when electricity costs are spiralling, and supply is hard to come by for the largest facilities. The US Environmental Protection Agency has suggested that server consolidation at current rates could end up cutting US companies’ carbon emissions by 15 million metric tonnes by 2011.
Calculating how much carbon emissions can be saved through virtualisation, however, is not entirely straightforward. It’s not just the number of servers that need to be counted, because a single server in the consolidated infrastructure will consume more power than a single non consolidated server. Other factors such as data centre cooling also need to be taken into account.