White Papers: virtualisation

It is both easy and inexpensive for any data centre, large or small, new or old, to get started allocating costs and carbon, but the expense and complexity escalate and ROI declines when excessive precision is specified. Read on for more.

While the benefits of this technology and service delivery model are well known, understood, and increasingly being taken advantage of, their effects on the data center physical infrastructure (DCPI) are less understood. The purpose of this paper is to describe these effects while offering possible solutions or methods for dealing with them. Read this whitepaper.

Using virtualisation to reduce the number of servers in the data center immediately reduces power, cooling and space requirements, lowering ongoing OPEX. Reducing the number of servers also reduces expensive space requirements, allowing for more services to be added to an existing data center, extending the life of this large investment

Cloud computing is a major departure from the traditional IT service delivery model. Services are no longer tied to dedicated hardware silos. Instead, virtualized resources — servers, network devices, and storage — are abstracted from the hardware. They move freely about the infrastructure, delivering services when and where they are needed. But this doesn’t mean that you have to completely reinvent IT to implement cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a disruptive transformation for IT. Public cloud offerings allow the business to directly access external services, creating security holes and quality blind spots while potentially eroding enterprise IT’s perceived value. To become internally agile and efficient, IT must go beyond just virtualizing servers to provide elastic, on-demand private cloud services. At the same time, IT needs to transform itself into the master of a dynamic service supply chain, driving smart sourcing decisions and orchestrating how internal, external, virtual, and traditional resources work together to optimize business value.