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By Ali Ahmar, regional sales manager, MENA, Brocade Communications
To maintain a competitive advantage in today's dynamic business environment, IT organisations are facing untold pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency. An organisation's ability to enhance agility, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies hinges on building a powerful yet flexible IT infrastructure that gives employees the tools and information they need to react quickly to changing market conditions.
As a result many are turning to virtualisation technologies and looking at ways to leverage its solutions built around pools of flexible server and storage resources that can not only meet dynamic business requirements but also help them consolidate resources, save on capital expenditures, reduce operational costs and improve management for their server and storage infrastructure.
But in doing so, many organisations fail to consider the overall impact of virtualisation on the data centre. From degraded application performance to inadequate data protection, and increased management complexity all of which could impact the business negatively as a result of being unable to meet SLAs, achieve compliance, or meet data growth requirements.
Virtualisation solution can eliminate challenges
Implementing a holistic virtualisation solution across the data centre cannot only help to achieve these objectives but also eliminate the challenges and unexpected complexities. For instance the acceleration of server virtualisation, in particular is enabling IT departments to build dynamic pools of compute power that can be allocated on demand as the business needs.
In fact, many organisations are starting to realise even more benefits by extending virtualisation beyond the server environment to the rest of the data centre, transforming their IT infrastructures into next-generation data centres. Nevertheless, implementing holistic virtualisation across the data centre is not yet a simple and straightforward task.
There are several challenges that are preventing organisations from realising true and holistic data centre virtualisation today. The first is performance - if organisations look at the data centre as a supply chain (each layer working in tandem to produce and deliver a product) they can start to understand that making the compute environment faster and more efficient doesn't necessarily make the entire process of delivering information to end users faster and more efficient.
Organisations are also finding it expensive to deploy new infrastructure that is flexible and capable of delivering the benefits of virtualisation, having invested heavily in building existing data centres. Added to which, interoperability issues make it hard to deploy a flexible infrastructure that is capable of supporting multiple platforms, protocols, and hardware brands.
Then there is the third and perhaps most pressing issue - complexity. Virtualised environments are inherently complex, relying on constant movement of resources to meet rising and falling traffic levels. While virtualisation certainly reduces the physical number of hardware devices, the connections between servers, networking components and storage can become much more complex.
Virtualisation makes for more flexible systems
Through virtualisation a system can be a web server one minute and a transaction server the next or even both at the same time, leading to a major increase in multiple domains with each requiring separate connections that need to be set up, monitored, and managed.
