Virtualisation makes waves

By Nafisa Akabor, ITWeb junior journalist

Johannesburg, 23 Jul 2009

Virtualisation is one of the three biggest waves seen yet in the IT industry, says Grant Morgan, CTO at Dimension Data.

“We've had the wave of the mainframe, client server computing, and virtualisation - which is the third biggest wave that is going to change the way we operate and run IT.”

Morgan was one of the speakers at ITWeb's second annual Virtualisation of the Enterprise conference that took place at The Forum in Bryanston this week. He discussed the impact of virtualisation on infrastructure and operations.

According to Morgan, it's not just server technology that will change the way organisations operate IT. "For the next five years or so this [virtualisation] is going to be what impacts your infrastructure and operations most."

Research giant Gartner predicts that virtualisation will be the highest impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012.

"Once you get hooked with virtualisation, you want to deploy it, you want to get maximum benefit out of it and you want to do it as quickly as you possibly can," said Morgan.

However, there are a few things that companies need to be conscious of before hand, he said. "It will change the way you deploy servers, buy servers, buy and look at storage, backup and the network itself, as well as the way you look at security."

According to Forrester Research, some challenges within the virtualised environment are maintaining high performance for individual machines, completing backups on time, and efficiently managing the capacity, Morgan pointed out.

"When you solve these challenges, you have to make sure that it's done as cost effectively as possible, or it will blow the TCO or ROI that you are planning for that virtualisation project."

While the technology might be simple, Morgan argued that companies will need to get their operational staff ready for the transition, as many processes will change when migrating to a virtualised environment. He said companies have the option of calling in consultants to check their operational readiness, and give an assessment of their environment and its readiness for virtualisation.

"Other alternatives are to allow third parties to come in and run the virtualised infrastructure for you, or to run your virtual infrastructure out of a completely separate data centre [not your own], in a cloud like fashion," added Morgan.

Morgan concluded that the benefit of these strategies is that companies are able to move forward and accelerate the deployment of virtualisation within their infrastructure.