Thirty-five percent of businesses in the UK are using virtualisation, and another 16% are interested in doing so, according to Forrester Research.
So said Ivo Vegter, freelance journalist and MC of the recent ITWeb-StorTech executive forum, held in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Symantec.
The event, held at the Southern Sun Hotel, in Rivonia, focused on the virtualised enterprise and covered topics including building the virtualised enterprise, energy efficiency as an element of eco-responsibility, and the do's and don'ts of standardisation in the data centre.
Tim Knowles, CEO of StorTech, said IT is under increasing pressure due to costly but under-utilised IT infrastructure, the need for efficiency and agility, budget constraints, and the increasing reliance and demands of business on IT.
"A backlog of new IT projects demanded by the business and the difficulty in planning for future project capacity requirements adds to the pressure. These pressures can encourage a company to adopt virtualisation," he stated.
Knowles discussed the benefits of server, storage and desktop virtualisation in terms of TCO, enhanced manageability and increased flexibility and responsiveness.
The key benefits of virtualisation, he said, was better infrastructure utilisation, agility and provisioning, reduced downtime, improved management, control and disaster recovery. A virtualised enterprise is one that is cost-effective, highly available and agile, he added.
The colour of IT
Barry Bredenkamp, CEO of the National Energy Efficiency Agency (NEEA), asked if the IT industry is "going green".
Bredenkamp discussed the impact of the IT industry on power usage and looked at 'demand side management', a programme aimed at reducing consumer use of energy through conservation or efficiency measures, while maintaining or improving outputs.
He said the IT industry contributes immensely to what he called the "standby power" problem. "By reducing its standby power consumption, the IT industry can make a significant contribution to the overall reduction of energy consumption."
Brendenkamp said Sun Microsystems is an IT company that is getting involved and developing a plan to reduce its power consumption: "The NEEA applauds them for this initiative, and the NEEA is working with them to implement the proposed solutions in SA."
The obstacles
According Symantec Africa pre-sales consulting manager Sheldon Hand, research done by Symantec shows there are four main challenges facing IT today.
The first three challenges include the cost of maintaining data centres, delivering against its SLA with business, and finding and keeping skilled IT staff, Hand said. "Finally, the biggest challenge IT faces is that the data centre is becoming increasingly complex."
Consolidation and virtualisation, as well as automation and standardisation, are solutions being used to face these challenges.
"Complexity relates to inefficiency; if you reduce the complexity there will be an increase in efficiency... enter virtualisation and standardisation."
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