Meet your requirements with virtualization

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Industry research company IDC predicts that by 2010 there will be 41 million physical servers deployed worldwide, a 700 per cent increase since 1995.

Recently IDC also reported that 22 per cent of all servers deployed are virtualized and that number is projected to reach 45 per cent in just 12 months. So it comes as no surprise that server virtualization is now considered a mainstream technology for customers.

Any information technology staff that's implemented virtualization technology is familiar with the laundry list of expected benefits: reduction of hardware and power costs through server consolidation, recovered data center space and a simplified IT infrastructure.

IT folks also know that virtualization isn't always a virtual snap; it can be overly complex, especially when storage assets and overall data center management are taken into account.

There's an opportunity to go beyond the traditional capabilities of just virtualizing servers and into a next wave of virtualization that can deliver more advanced benefits, such as disaster recovery, high availability and dynamic provisioning. To that end, new products and services are available to help companies get more from their virtualization efforts than they'd ever imagined.

Some of the latest servers including Dell PowerEdge servers feature increased memory, higher input-output ratio (I/O), help reduce energy consumption and support many more virtual machines.

With so many emerging options, it's important to match virtualization technologies with the scale of an organization. This gives IT departments the flexibility to adapt to the growth of the business. IT departments can now combine the latest servers with emerging storage tools made for virtualized environments.

For smaller, remote environments, servers likely to be sufficient are those that can run multiple applications, deliver virtualization management capabilities and provide affordable high availability. But in a medium-sized or large organization, an end-to-end virtualization solution with seamless scalability and advanced disaster recovery is preferable.

Large data centers introduce even more stringent requirements that are most likely to be met only by an automated turn-key data center solution, such as a process area network system. This system leverages I/O virtualization capabilities - consolidating and virtualizing server compute-resources and enabling them to be managed like hard drives in a SAN (Storage Area Network). This approach dramatically reduces complexity and allows resources to be provisioned and re-deployed in minutes, not weeks.

Finally, when it comes to services, a company needs to get the most out of its virtualization strategy and it's critical to remember that one size definitely does not fit all. That means matching service offerings to the right virtualization technology; reviewing existing virtualization resources to identify opportunities to optimize them; and using that information to assess multi-platform considerations, advanced storage options and power and cooling problems.

Above all, it means ensuring that an IT department has fast access to technical experts who can provide tailored consulting to match a customer's virtualization implementation.

In a nutshell, virtualization creates a more agile infrastructure, reduces the total cost of IT ownership and minimizes downtime. IT operations are more efficient and effective with virtualization, leading companies to profitability while retaining centralized control.

Enterprises are now seeking to increase business agility by simplifying IT infrastructures and getting more out of computing resources.

(Sameer Garde is the country general manager, Dell India)