However, infrastructure virtualization requires a significant change in an organization’s culture from both an IT and business perspective; moving away from the siloed business unit autonomy position towards a corporate pooled resource perspective, which has the potential to deliver even more significant savings and increased systems agility than those quantified above.

Above all else, IT infrastructure virtualization must be recognized as a technology that has evolved at the right moment in time due to the convergence of a number of influencing factors. As such, it will help organizations address the challenges faced in competing in today’s global economy. Understanding what infrastructure virtualization can deliver, and how it is delivered, is the key to IT departments’ successful evolution towards a more efficient model for deploying and consuming IT resources.

Virtualization increasingly viewed by CIOs and CEOs as a strategic technology to be considered

Virtualization is the practice of running a layer of software on a server that allows multiple operating systems and environments to run on the same piece of hardware as if they were separate physical servers. Virtualization allows computing resources to be used more efficiently and also allows much greater flexibility in managing and allocating these resources.

Virtualization as a technology is a step towards the redesign of how IT is delivered and consumed by customers. The transformation of organizations from siloed business units towards a virtual business process-driven architecture is supported by the adoption of infrastructure virtualization. The key benefits of IT virtualization can be characterized in the following generic ways:

– It increases the IT department’s ability to be more agile and flexible with the allocation of resources, enabling high-priority tasks to be guaranteed the resources needed to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

– It can reduce operational IT costs and improve the financial return organizations can expect to receive from their IT investments.

– It improves the quality of service that customers, both internal and external, can expect from IT.

-It reduces energy consumption, which enables organizations to reduce their carbon footprint.

-It is a stepping stone towards an adaptive IT infrastructure paradigm, where internal IT capacity is augmented by additional external resources to meet both expected and unexpected peak demands.

The expansion of IT virtualization technologies has raised its profile within organizations across all industries and business sectors. This new approach extends beyond just thinking about the traditional view of IT virtualization, i.e. server consolidation. It is increasingly being viewed by CIOs and CEOs as a strategic technology that organizations should consider as a solution to breaking the rigid links between applications, physical hardware, platforms and middleware, and end users, so that IT is able to meet the demand that business is placing upon it in today’s ever-changing world.

Many organizations initially adopt IT virtualization in order to save costs through server consolidation, but then realize that other benefits are possible when operating with a virtualized infrastructure, and so IT virtualization then becomes a strategic part of the overall IT plan.

Cost savings

Infrastructure virtualization offers organizations significant cost savings in terms of power and cooling, support costs, and increased flexibility and ability to respond to business dynamics. An organization currently operating 250 dual core servers can save GBP2 million over three years, according to Butler Group estimates.

Virtualization now operates across a much wider spectrum than just x86 server virtualization; it encompasses networks, storage, applications, desktop, and data centers. By combining these technologies, organizations can achieve significant benefits, and transform their IT infrastructure from a static to dynamic resource that can help the business to meet its strategic goals.

In fact, a power saving in the order of GBP78,000 per 1,000 PCs per year can be realized by moving from a full desktop PC infrastructure to a server-hosted desktop virtualization solution. In another example of a financial benefit, organizations can save GBP4,000 per 1,000 helpdesk calls per month through the promotion of user self-service via the utilization of application virtualization technologies to reduce helpdesk calls.

As more organizations consider deploying infrastructure virtualization, they must consider its impact as a major change on the whole organizational culture.

As organizations in both the public and private sectors struggle to make their IT infrastructures less of an inhibitor of change and more of a vehicle capable of adapting to constantly changing demand, so the concept of virtualization has gained significant interest and momentum. In effect, IT infrastructure virtualization creates the conditions needed to support the flexible use of IT resources in pursuit of the organization’s strategic intent. This, however, is not purely a technical challenge, but requires an organizational change from the business unit concept of self-autonomy towards a pooled resource model across the entire organization.

This shift in how IT resources are deployed and consumed within the organization requires the structure to be transparent so that management can be performed based on corporate priorities, and the cost and value of these priorities can be clearly seen. Effectively, IT is being moved from a business unit-funded project structure (where the head of department bids for, and provides, the initial capital for the IT project with the on-going maintenance expense being funded from a central corporate budget), towards a mixed, pay-as-you-go model, where the corporate budget funds the capital costs associated with providing the underlying infrastructure, and the business units are charged for the services they consume and pay for the deployment of any new services required.

However, the biggest problems faced by organizations wanting to adopt infrastructure virtualization today in production environments is the fact that not all aspects of IT have kept pace with the rapid evolution of the technology. Most notably, the lack of management capabilities across its physical and virtual worlds, and software licensing and vendor support models that have yet to catch up with the IT virtualization market – resulting in early adopters struggling to operate fully compliant IT environments. However, progress is being made on all these issues, and the adoption of infrastructure virtualization looks set to become more accepted in production environments as the entire technology market matures.