To achieve IT consolidation, virtualization has become the most
widespread option. Virtualization for consolidation is a viable
option because it keeps the interest of stakeholders intact and
serves optimal computing power as per requirement unlike physical
hardware where organizations need to anticipate maximum computing
power which is very unlikely in normal operation. However if not
effectively understood, planned executed it can easily lead to an
ineffective implementation.
The fundamental virtue of virtualization is to grow
infrastructure as you grow. TCO (total cost of ownership) becomes
practical and viable to justify and can be extended as and when
required. Virtualization can be extended further to create private
cloud computing platforms.
Prevailing myths
In today’s IT market, there are outstanding technology
products available, which are supported by respective technology
companies and principal organization.
Whilst, organizations initiate the project of Consolidation
using Virtualization, they tend to overlook the critical business
requirements. Organizations also tend to skip a deep dive
study of current infrastructure and its utilization; hence unable
to or incorrectly anticipating the future growth.
For various reasons organizations don’t involve all the
stakeholders to get the information on business growth and future
projections and ‘Consolidation’ becomes one of the
expensive projects to execute where final goal is not defined
clearly to all the stakeholders.
Organizations start the proof of concept internally to address
the business requirements but actually end up getting into product
evaluation. Upon evaluating 2 or 3 products, organizations tend to
deviate from the goal of Consolidation and are disillusioned with
the ‘product features’. Hence, they end up choosing the
most impressive rather than the most appropriate product.
Potential approach
Organizations must take the approach which gives unbiased
opinion about current infrastructure and the subsequent path to
achieve Consolidation using Virtualization.
IT vendors can take the following stepwise approach to address
their client needs.
1. Understand from the client IT team the goal
to be achieved by introducing Virtualization.
2. Take the stock of current infrastructure
and understand the future growth.
3. Do deep dive study of each of the components
of the IT infrastructure. This study includes evaluating the
following parameters -
a. Servers utilization ( CPU, memory, I/O)
b. Current applications deployed
c. High-availability implemented
d. Application Components study (DB, Application
servers tier, web tier etc…)
4. Based on study, create the blue print of
deployment architecture using virtualization technology as
concept.
5. Help client decide on virtualization
technology product to be deployed. This can be combination of
hardware and software products to achieve the final goal.
6. Work towards reducing the TCO by utilizing
current hardware.
The author, Deepesh Upadhye is Chief Architect
& Head - Technology Solutions Group, Clover
Infotech