With IT becoming an integral part of every business function, the role of enterprise IT infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. The economic environment today is forcing businesses to re-look at their investments and it is vital that organisations spend their time and effort in ensuring that their enterprise infrastructure is efficiently utilised. The biggest challenge faced by the enterprise would be to protect technology investments and also best utilise the available resources.
Every business today has become extremely competitive, margins are shrinking, and acquiring new customers to gain market share is getting increasingly difficult and expensive. In this given environment, if an enterprise can build a scalable, flexible and future proof systems architecture, it will help reap the benefits of investments in IT.
As the server and storage infrastructure is the core of the enterprise architecture in a datacentre, it is imperative that technologies that support scalability and flexibility should be deployed. One key feature that has to be considered to ensure success in building an efficient server and storage infrastructure is virtualisation.
Virtualisation has been successfully deployed in large Indian enterprises today because it delivers real benefits that drive business value. It not only helps decreasing IT costs and business risks, but also improves efficiency and flexibility of the infrastructure. This enhances overall business resilience as more enterprises start using IT as a key business differentiator.
Through virtualisation, the enterprise can achieve a simpler, more cost-efficient IT infrastructure that aligns with emerging business needs. It’s a technology that transforms a physical form of infrastructure and redelivers it in a virtual form. This transformed virtual form, if implemented well, is capable of the same functionality as the original, yet is able to dramatically increase efficiency and flexibility. The virtualised environment is, in short, significantly easier to change to suit changing goals because it has been freed from its physical constraints. This is a tremendous advantage in a business context, where IT services must continually be revised, adapted, or developed from scratch to meet emerging business needs.
In this way, the metamorphosis from physical to virtual server and storage infrastructure has brought with it a dramatic improvement in total business value to the enterprise.
Getting the best return on IT investment means getting the highest business value from servers and storage, yet many servers spend the majority of their available processing time sitting idle. Whether they are accomplishing business tasks or not, still the IT infrastructure deployed will generate many types of costs, including management costs, electrical consumption and heat that can reduce your profitability and increase overheads of running the datacentre.
Several features available today in servers and storage virtualisation help improve efficiencies and reduce costs. With most of the large enterprises having deployed virtualisation in the datacentre in some form or the other already, they can now look forward to deploy advanced features in virtualisation like live partition mobility, resource pooling, dynamic allocation of resources that will help reduce planned downtime and improve the utilisation of resources.
While virtualisation has become a de facto server and storage standard today in an enterprise datacentre, success of deploying it depends on planning in the initial stages of building the infrastructure. Deploying advanced features of virtualisation can help an enterprise improve the server and storage efficiencies by at least 40 percent and reduce costs also significantly compared to a discrete server and storage deployment. n