“While there are some inherent security concerns entailed by virtualization, a majority of these stem from incomplete planning and management of virtualization rollouts rather than the technology itself. Virtualisation technologies, when deployed optimally, can actually help increase application security in multiple ways. The application isolation capabilities offered by virtualisation helps minimize the domino effects that usually precede an application crash. The P2V (physical-to-virtual) migration capabilities help improve disaster recovery times and minimize non-availability due to security incidents,” he notes.

“Asset under-utilisation has long been an incumbent practice in data centres – the server inefficiencies and management overload directly resulting in higher power consumption and operating costs. The advent of blade computing and virtualisation technologies provides a ready solution to this problem and many data center practitioners have indeed adopted these technologies.” 

“Blade computing alleviates the problem of under-utilization by providing data centre administrators with the capability for flexible provisioning of servers – blades can be added or removed with minimum fuss to match the load (peak, sub-peak). Blade server racks, however, are very dense and entail special cooling requirements that can be addressed through optimal data centre design,” he signs off.