With the economic climate forcing organisations to seek out ever more effective ways of reducing their operational expenditure, virtualisation is a more pertinent topic than ever before.
“But virtualisation has a great deal more to offer than simply allaying the need for a company to rip out and replace its server infrastructure every couple of years,” says Bernard Tischendorf, head of the services organisation at Sun Microsystems South Africa.
“Virtualisation is one of the quickest ways for companies to get their datacenter power consumption to plummet, the amount of real-estate space they need in order to house that datacenter to decrease and for the cost of managing their entire fleet of infrastructure to come down, in some cases by as much as half.
“And all of this pretty much falls under the umbrella term of consolidation,” he says.
“Consolidation and virtualisation, because of their close relationship in IT terms, are topics that are often confused with each other. The distinction isn’t difficult to grasp however,” Tischendorf says.
“Virtualisation is a means of consolidating one’s infrastructure. So, to use this in an example, by consolidating workloads in the enterprise onto less physical hardware, using virtualisation, less power is needed to drive that hardware.
“Additionally, because there’s less hardware to contend with, less space is required to house it,” he says.
“And lastly, because smarter and more virtualisation-aware management tools have come to the fore, the organisation can even afford to get by with less IT staff than what it did before.”
While these benefits are generally a great starting point, they’re nothing new.
“Few companies have realised just how deeply virtualisation reaches into a business’s IT environment.
“Aside from server virtualisation, there’s storage virtualisation, desktop virtualisation and application virtualisation – and all are as valuable as each other,” explains Tischendorf.
“The principals are very similar too, “ he adds.
“Virtualisation is quite simply the abstraction of the physical representation of hardware from the logical representation of that same hardware.
“So in the case of the server world, while that allows two or more distinct virtual machines to be run on a single piece of hardware, so in the case of storage virtualisation, two separate file systems or data stores can be housed on a single piece of physical storage hardware.
“The analogy extends beyond those two areas too however. With desktop virtualisation, a computer image might reside on a centralised server or piece of data storage, but be deployed on a client computer out on the network.
“And with Application virtualisation it’s once again, a similar situation – the application is stored centrally and ‘streamed’ to the desktop as and when functionality is required,” he says.
Tischendorf says that Sun’s weight in the virtualisation space is substantial.
“Sun plays in every one of the major areas of virtualisation,” he says, “and as such has become one of the primary choices when it comes to transforming physical infrastructure into a well-managed virtual ecosystem.
“We have also been through this process ourselves and can therefore speak of the benefits of virtualisation first-hand,” he says.
Tischendorf says that by taking this approach at its Santa Clara facility alone, Sun has managed to reduce its utility bills for that facility by 60% and earn over $1m in rebates.
“And that’s aside from the savings we experienced on other fronts,” he says.
“By giving customers the complete picture, virtualisation becomes a no-brainer. We believe this technology’s time has come and over the coming months, more and more customers will become serious about its implementation,” he concludes.
