Bladewatch.com

Washington Technology

Although nearly three-quarters of federal information technology managers recognize the benefits of virtualization, just 20 percent say their agencies are harnessing the technology to its fullest, according to a new report.

Seventy-nine percent of the respondents said their agencies have begun implementing some form of virtualization, but only 50 percent said the implementation has been successful.

The report, released today by CDW Government Inc., surveyed 377 federal IT managers in April.

The IT managers cited the many benefits of virtualization, including reduced capital and operating costs, improved continuity of operations and network security, and better utilization of computing resources.

However, they also cited the lack of up-front funding to capture the larger but later benefits as the single biggest obstacle to greater success in establishing virtualization within the federal government.

Check out this article talking about adoption and use of virtualization within the Government sectors, it’s an interesting read, I wonder how much issues with segregation of applications, of legacy platforms and funding in terms of capital are the non technical barriers to entry. That managers recognize the benefits is the first step, what we need though is (as with the private sector) a top down approach encompassing the application, the infrastructure coupled with the business requirements and solutions based on this ideal, we might only start off small, for example virtualization of the client pc first, moving on to server virtualization of the shared web platforms before moving on to a national or sector wide programme. Virtualization of the infrastructure is the first step, we then need to inventory the applications, consolidate their roles, virtualize and abstract them from the underlying infrastructure to reduce support costs, aid information sharing and empower end users (where regulations permit) is the next step.

Key objectives should be:

• Application consolidation – share application layer where possible, can we not have similar web/citrix based applications on the same infrastructure
• Infrastructure consolidation – how many servers is it that we actually need to provide service and what level of x86 servers can be reduced/recycled/decommissioned?
• Legacy consolidation – we need to abstract ourselves from those legacy ‘high maintenance’ applications where possible, there will be ones where the cost of support is less than the cost of a re-code.
• Virtualization of the server estate where possible combined with application virtualization where possible to the three key ones, web, citrix (or the equivalent) and grid.

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