Hospital reveals virtualisation challenges

Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children has learned the hard way that virtualisation efforts won't be successful if vendors are not ready to support you, according to its director of technology, writes Tech World.

Speaking at a Frankly Speaking breakfast hosted by IT World Canada last week, Ana Andreasian, director of technology at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, said the hospital has already consolidated a considerable amount of its server infrastructure, which now includes 300 physical and 60 virtual machines. The hospital employs about 110 IT staff members, who serve more than 5 000 employees.

Andreasian said the biggest issue she's experienced so far has come from vendors who do not properly test their applications before offering them to virtualisation customers.

Not all servers can or should be virtualised, according to Novell cloud chief, Moiz Kohari, states CNET News.

He urges cloud service providers to focus on making their heterogeneous set-ups work as one. Kohari told ZDNet Asia that virtualisation has yet to overcome input/output latency issues at the hypervisor level, as compared with provisioned servers.

As a result, he said, virtualisation is not the best choice in cases where service providers and businesses need to ensure as little latency as possible, for example, in a stock exchange environment.

Cisco, NetApp, and VMware have expanded their long-standing collaboration to deliver an end-to-end secure multi-tenancy design architecture to address the growing need of secure virtual data centres created by enterprises moving towards 100% virtualised data centres, according to EE Times India.

This provides enhanced security in cloud environments by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

As part of their collaboration, Cisco, NetApp, and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pretested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualised infrastructure.