The biggest risks with any construction are scope creep and dependence: the project becomes dependent on the skills of the builder chosen and the materials used. Quickly the realisation is that the initial requirements now need improvement and a challenge emerges as to whether the materials invested in and the builder chosen can deliver the end result.
In the real world of IT, the big bad wolf is the unexpected, and the 'house' is the data centre architecture. The extensibility and flexibility of the selected technology will determine the business' ability to meet changing needs - which is inevitable. On the surface, technology looks 'good enough' and the basics sufficient, but buyer beware - the advice given is normally worth what you pay for it!
As with a physical structure, each component of the IT infrastructure should always be carefully placed brick by brick to make sure the business has a level of resilience that is easy to manage, simple to run and facilitates the company's ability to grow and make money.
The great divide
The greatest coup in the virtual space was the ability to separate software from the hardware through the invention of the bare metal hypervisor - the foundation. Now with virtualisation as the underlying architecture, businesses are liberated from physical resource constraints and can transform the economics of IT. This first maturity phase is the separation phase of virtualisation, through enterprise class, bare metal hypervisors.
The greatest coup in the virtual space was the ability to separate software from the hardware through the invention of the bare metal hypervisor.
Chris Norton is country manager of VMware Southern Africa.
Choosing the right technology provider here is as important as laying the foundations to a 100-storey building. You need to anchor your investment properly.
With the foundation set, effective infrastructure can be built up within the business to the next phase: consolidation. This is similar to where a quantity surveyer (QS) comes in and plans the delivery and scoping of a project through a careful selection of managerial procedures and tools. Now the tools, skills and materials used start to become defining factors in the agility of the end result. The same is especially true for the IT environment!
The third stage of virtualisation maturity, aggregation, lets a company combine a collection of computers into a pool of resources and introduces the agility in the environment, including CPU, memory, storage, and networking. Now computing resources can be provided flexibly as demands on infrastructure fluctuate within the businesses.
No interruptions
Compute capacity can be supplied on-demand, because dynamic capacity management revolutionises IT purchases and computing utilisation. Ease of management is created as business applications are run on virtual platforms. The resource pool is more resilient than individual computers and if one computer crashes, others seamlessly pick up the workload maintaining business continuity. Aggregation provides a number of critical tools for the organisation to leverage as the environment created is utilised in day-to-day operations and becomes business critical.
With the previous stages of the building delivered with planning, insight and forethought, a platform has been built that can be enhanced because of the foundation. The next major IT evolutionary step - automation, can be embraced. Automation frees human resources from time-consuming manual tasks such as server provisioning, capacity planning, load balancing, disaster recovery, and power management. Automation leads to better response times, higher levels of availability and frees IT staff to pursue more profit-orientated tasks such as improving core business applications.
The fifth and final level of maturity in the data centre is cloud enablement. It will bridge corporate boundaries and enable resources on-premise and off-premise to be combined securely into a single compute cloud. This infrastructure frees companies from the constraints imposed by physical data centres. Businesses can now run without the huge costs associated with over-provisioning resources for peak demands, failover, or disaster recovery. A cloud infrastructure is the foundation of a computing environment with complete transparency across local and off-premise clusters that will proactively ensure quality of service by tapping resources independent of their location.
The most feared part of what could happen to any IT Infrastructure if the environment is unexpectedly 'blown' down is the ability to easily and safely move into another environment. How quickly businesses can adapt the fifth step of virtualisation depends on the strength and quality of the foundation laid, the way they have constructed the environment as well as the technology and materials used.
Virtualisation is a positively disruptive technology that, when planned step by step using the right tools for the job and the right materials, can support an organisation to weather the onslaught of any eventuality and give it the best possible chance of survival in the real world.
* Chris Norton is country manager of VMware Southern Africa.
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