Bladewatch.com

ITPro

UK IT directors are not keeping up with the pace of virtualisation when it comes to data centre management, a new survey released to today has revealed.

Over two thirds (67 per cent) of them, questioned by researcher Vanson Bourne, said they did not know exactly how many virtual machines they actually have.

More than half (51 per cent) said they had not had time to adjust their data centre management strategy to meet the challenges of a virtualised environment.

The research found the most common reason UK businesses were turning to virtualisation was to cut costs, which was cited by 50 per cent. Nearly one in five (19 per cent) said they used virtualisation to make management easier, closely followed by eliminating server sprawl (17 per cent) and increasing device utilisation rates (14 per cent).

As a result, Tom Brand, senior consultant at survey sponsor, Morse said that virtual infrastructures could be difficult to keep track of because virtual machines were cheap and easy to create.

The concept of server sprawl isn’t just a virtual thing, understanding which servers are used and owned by which business lines is a common concept for most CIOs, particularly when it comes to billing, upgrading, scheduling work or reporting. What virtualization introduces more is the challenge of opportunities, I might be able to rebuild a virtual machine in minutes/hours, I might re-provision and re-allocate a virtual machine between a business unit, a set of developers, and the ability to provision servers means the processes might not be best suited to keeping everything up to date in terms of server numbers and ownership.

It’s important for end users and service providers to recognize the technical and non-technical issues when looking at a virtual infrastructure. Simply the act of virtualizing your server infrastructure could be moving ‘the problem’ from a physical to a virtual one. We need to establish the barriers to success from an organizational and technical standpoint, what tools and process/best practices can we adopt to better know our server infrastructure, to know and record which systems belong to which users. This of course is the first step, as we move to cloud, to the grid platform what processes, what elements of the infrastructure are needed to power your application are next.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.