Why You Need To Move To Virtualization In Your Networks

To keep ahead of rising costs and security issues businesses need to understand the value of virtualization in lowering their cost and making their network more efficient.

As more and more government departments and businesses have a requirement for greater control over information residing in distributed networks a solution is needed to ensure that the objectives laid out below can be met. Virtualization has had a significant impact on computing in the last few years and is still in some ways finding it's full potential. This is due to the greater processing powers available to the system designer, allowing them to incorporate more complex and memory intensive systems.

In a modern world the need for a flexible, highly secure network is more critical than ever. The use of traditional network methods is not sufficient for today's requirements of global access to larger and larger files and data on a 24/7 basis yet still ensuring that all this information is safe from prying eyes. This is the kind of scenario that traditionally involved significant cost and effort due to costly hardware redundancy and complex installations requiring constant maintenance and updating from the system administrators.

A typical service or application would involve a service hosted by two x86 servers, one running the live system and an inactive server designed as a backup server in case of a failure on the active one. Due to the fact that in a complex global company or government there is often a need for the critical data hosted on these high availability servers to be separated to ensure that high levels of security are maintained. This means that for each service, a pair of servers must be implemented resulting in a dramatic increase in hardware resources and those resources being utilized inefficiently. This has led to the average server utilization today being a mere 10% to 15% of total capacity, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC)

The traditional way of hosting most confidential data on networks involved the separation of services on individual physical computers and a redundant set of backup computers for each service. So keeping that in mind we could safely assume that 15 services would require 30 computers/servers. Due to the growth in desktop deployments and x86 server technology the infrastructure and operational challenges include:

Hardware Utilization. A typical x86 server deployment achieves only 10% to 15% utilization of it's overall capacity, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), a Internet market research firm. Organizations will typically run just one application on each server to avoid the possible risk of a vulnerability in one application affecting the availability of another on the same server.

Growing Infrastructure Costs. The costs of supporting a modern computer infrastructure have increased dramatically. It's important that today's computer infrastructure remains in a operational state at all times and this results in a dramatic increase in power consumption and premises costs that do not change with utilization levels.

Growing cost of IT Management. Due to the ever increasing complexity of computer environments, more specialized and experienced staff are required to fulfill the roles and so the costs of such high skilled personnel have increased. Disproportionate amounts of time and resources are now used on server maintenance in the form of manual tasks thus increasing the workload and staffing level even further.

Disaster Recovery Planning. Downtime of critical applications, servers and the inaccessibility of critical data for end user computers is affecting today's big businesses and governments. The constant threat of information security attacks, pandemics, terrorism and natural disasters has highlighted the importance of a properly thought out BCP or business continuity plan.

High Maintenance Desktops. Controlling and managing enterprise desktops to ensure they are not vulnerable to attack and contain all the latest patches and updates without compromising a users ability to work effectively is complex and expensive.

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Comments

Wed, 8 Apr 2009 at 5:04 PM, by Jennifer
Hi Brian - looking for Virtualization/Tech specialists content to support newsletter(s).

Would you allow me to reprint this article?

Please let me know -

thanx, Jennifer
janderson@imninc.com
blogsunlocked.wordpress.com

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