BANGALORE, INDIA: Virtualization is causing a paradigm shift in IT operations with far-reaching implications. This concept is becoming so universal, it's a theme in every organisation's effort to streamline, optimise and to revitalize its enterprise strategy. 

By some estimates about 60-65 percent of medium to large enterprises have either started or currently engaged in some type of virtualization activity. And in majority of these initiatives, the primary objective is to drive down costs by consolidating existing infrastructure assets. But this is just one of the benefits of virtualization. 

An effective virtualization strategy can be transformational and deliver capabilities to enterprises and create an agile, highly available and scalable enterprise ready to meet any organizational needs. As virtualization enables CIOs to be more responsive in providing targeted solutions, it is driving more profound changes in the structures and processes throughout the business, forcing a better management processes.

Key points to consider in a Virtualization Roadmap
The virtualization process provides an ideal opening to align IT with the business, and many CIOs and IT managers are capitalizing on this opportunity. But before they start on this journey, some points to ponder and plan on:

1. Be prepared to look at your enterprise from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective.
 
a. From the bottom-up look at all the hardware inventory and its dependencies all the way including the application layer.  Based on maturity level, most organizations do have a baseline of all sorts, but lack a complete 360-degree view of the dependencies of how the business applications map to physical infrastructure including routers, switches, storage devices, servers, attributes like utilization of components, etc.  This will help in identifying virtualization opportunities both for some early quick wins and long term.

b. Following the above with a top-down approach can identify the current capabilities and demand structures within the enterprise and helps to suitably align both the consolidation opportunities and to institute a long term virtualization strategy.

2. Go Virtual Everywhere! Be prepared to virtualize every aspect of the enterprise.  This means looking at not only servers, but also storage and network layer, applications and everywhere data reaches out to. 

3. While rethinking overall operational structure, re-align business processes around work load addition and provisioning.  While consolidation using virtualization reduces physical server sprawl, allowing better support of user needs with less hardware resulting in lower operational costs [physical space, utilities and other costs], this can also accelerate provisioning. This means self provisioned workloads leading to dynamic resource allocations. 

4. Virtualization of an enterprise, if done right, can become a major component of dynamic IT.  Enterprises can create an information environment empowering all individuals with access to information, adapt to changing needs as business demands it with an optimized cost structure.

5. While virtualization provides many benefits, it can be complex to manage a virtualized environment.  Virtual server sprawl can very soon add to management overhead.  It's essential to employ the right tools to manage the environment without the risk of inaccuracies, complexities and added inefficiencies. In fact the right set of third-party tools and applications will make the entire planning and implementation effort smoother.

Conclusion
Virtualization today has grown beyond just reducing cost on hardware, space and power to a great enabler in bringing change in terms of holistic planning, procurement and to accelerate implementations enterprise wide to achieve agile IT environment.  While a considerable number of IT decision makers are testing the waters, the market is rapidly evolving to support, simplify and enhance technology in this arena.

The focus for CIOs should now be in instituting an enterprise strategy adopting virtualization as a technology to transform their IT investments and benefit from an information service infrastructure that provides flexibility and control.

(The author is Principal Architect, System Integration, Infosys Technologies)