Virtualization Strategies News, Analysis, White Papers and Case Studies on Virtualization Software and Hardware Strategies

This week at AFCOM’s Data Center World event in Las Vegas, the AFCOM Data Center Institute announced it’s Five Bold Predictions for the data center.  These predictions are:

1)      By 2015, the talent pool of qualified senior level technical and managerial talent to run data centers will shrink by 45%. This is alarming when you consider the dramatic growth in business data processing. The economy can be to blame as training programs are often quick to be cut. The other challenge is fewer students are opting for collegiate programs in high density computing. Companies like Data Center Journal offer excellent data center training programs.

2)      By 2010, more than half of all data centers will have to relocate to new facilities or outsource some applications. This is great news for firms that build date centers as well as colocation and managed services companies Read More…

Posted under Cloud Computing, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization News

Over the past several years, virtualization has emerged as an easy and reliable way to improve disaster preparedness. This technology provides companies the ability to dramatically increase the efficiency and availability of their resources in the event of a disaster. Using virtualization, enterprises can ensure they are back online within minutes or hours, rather than days, weeks or months.

Most companies — from small businesses to fortune 500 corporations — are not prepared to recover from a fire, flood or other major disasters. Their DR plans are either weak or non-existent.

Here are some of the most common problems we find with traditional DR plans:

* Many are half baked.

* The plan is untested.

* Not all outsource partners are prepared.

* Recovery and production environments are incompatible.

Companies are increasingly abandoning their old DR platforms, and turning to virtualization technology to prepare their business for disaster and safeguard their assets. Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies

Virtualization has become a very hot topic in IT organizations. As more and more solutions enter the market the discussion is shifting away from if it should be used and toward how it should be used and what vendors should you work with. CiRBA recently published an excellent white paper designed to help IT executives choose the right virtualization technologies for their business.

All virtualization technologies help towards the common benefits of optimizing the utilization of hardware, and software leading to benefits like cost reductions, more flexibility and better business continuity.

The challenge in all this is that each virtualization technology operates in a slightly different manner, and these differences are more or less pronounced depending on how they are used. This is compounded by the fact that every IT environment is different, each having unique operational patterns, technical compositions and business constraints. To cap this off, every virtualization vendor is highly motivated to win business in their own way, which changes the economics of the situation. Of all the trends currently emerging, the desire to avoid an expensive solution when a cheap one will do is relatively high on most people’s lists. Read More…

Posted under CiRBA, Data Center Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Products / Reviews, Virtualization Strategies, White Paper, virtualization

Business and IT leaders are faced with the challenges of delivering cost-effective and secure IT infrastructure that must nimbly adapt to the business. These business operations and the applications often run around the clock. Server virtualization is entering the mainstream of business computing precisely because it can help in today’s IT world of feverish change and decreasing budgets.

Virtualization was introduced in the 1960s on mainframe hardware but only recently has emerged to address the vast quantities of highly underutilized x86 servers. These servers are seemingly everywhere—from data centers to hall closets, and they typically house just one application. Virtualization helps solve this costly epidemic of excess capacity by turning one server into ten or twenty by separating the server’s operating system and applications from the underlying physical hardware. This decoupling is possible for desktops and servers and applies to various application in networks and storage. Virtual infrastructure refers to the decoupling of a system and its services. Hardware is managed separately from the operating system and applications as a single pool of processing, storage and networking power, which can be dynamically allocated to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them and the administrator manages and optimizes resources globally across the enterprise.

Read More…

Posted under Data Center Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Strategies