– David M. Lynch, VP of Marketing for Embotics (www.embotics.com), says:

Virtualization has four main benefits for the enterprise. The first is the reduction of the datacenter footprint, lowering the requirement for power and cooling in the datacenter.

The second is improved flexibility and responsiveness by IT to the business groups; new servers can be brought online in minutes, while new applications can be developed and tested quicker, and new servers provisioned in days rather than weeks. Unplanned downtime can be virtually eliminated, and disruptions from planned downtime easily minimized. The IT organization can also provide better performance and availability guarantees. The overall level of service improves.

Virtualization has also enabled significant advances when it comes to business continuity (our third benefit). The built-in mobility and ease of cloning (i.e., creating a copy of an existing server quickly and easily) capabilities have greatly simplified disaster planning and recovery, enabling organizations that couldn’t afford the cost of a hot backup facility to provide the same basic functionality without the heavy investment.

The fourth main benefit of virtualization is that it allows organizations to get ready for the next technology wave to hit the datacenter – clouds. The underlying technology for most clouds is virtualization. By implementing virtualization architectures within their datacenters, organizations can build their own internal clouds, gaining expertise in both using clouds to the best effect, as well as understanding what is required in these environments in terms of management and security. This ensures that when the time comes to adopt cloud technology, it can be done with confidence and experience rather than a blind leap of faith.

Definitions:

  1. Virtual Sprawl – Your environment’s way of telling you it’s out of control.
  2. Hypervisor – The virtualization technology that sits directly on the hardware and allows multiple virtual machines to use it at the same time without getting in each other’s way.
  3. Cloud – A computing environment (either within an organization’s datacenter or outside of it), that can run an organization’s virtual machine, delivering the application directly to the end users.