The Biggar Picture: The Business Optimization Blog

Ask just about anyone if they’d like to repeat 2010, and the answer you’ll resoundingly hear is “No!”  Without a doubt, 2009 was a challenging year for most markets, most organizations and most individuals – and storage markets were certainly no exception.

However, there were some bright spots, and within IT circles, virtualization was clearly one of them. Largely resistant to the macroeconomic climate, server virtualization deployments grew in both scope and size last year, as many organizations adopted a “virtualize first” policy to help cut IT costs.

While server virtualization has been proven to help reduce operational, capital and business-process-related costs, as its use extends across the data center to more applications and sites, it is creating a number of new challenges– particularly around storage.

On the flip side, server virtualization also creates new opportunities for organizations to improve efficiency (via storage virtualization, VDI, etc.), resilience (i.e., data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery) and agility (i.e., cloud).

To maximize your IT investments and business benefits, as well as to help you steer you clear of pitfalls, I’ve listed below the “Top 5” resolutions every IT organization should make when it comes to server virtualization this year:

• 1. Do a Virtualization “Health Check”: How “healthy” is your server virtualization environment? Are you meeting defined objectives (e.g., around consolidation, cost-savings, performance, etc.)? Identify “red flags” (e.g., performance, management, capacity, etc.) and create a course of action for 2010 and beyond. Your health check should encompass your server, storage, networking and desktop environment, and should include a capacity planning exercise.
• 2. Look at the “Bigger Picture” (i.e., server-to-storage virtualization): Think storage, network and desktop. Server virtualization is good, but server virtualization PLUS storage virtualization is probably better.  Take the time to research the benefits of extending virtualization across your environment and make sure to ask vendors about their support for these technologies moving forward.
• 3. Comparison Shop: Conduct your own side-by-side evaluations of product definitions, features and vendor road maps. Like it or not, we live in an industry in which the same term can mean different things depending on who you talk with. A good example is storage virtualization.   What is storage virtualization to one vendor may be dynamic provisioning to another, for example.
• 4. Avoid Vendor Lock-In, Think in Heterogeneous Terms: As you do your comparison shopping, be aware of solutions that may lock you in to a certain vendor or architecture. What may seem like a good investment today could have negative business and IT implications over the mid- to long-term. This applies to storage, server virtualization, networking and cloud technologies.
• 5. Think Business Resilience: Research shows that one of the leading drivers of server virtualization adoption is BC/DR. That said, only a small fraction of organizations are actually taking advantage of the Solutions that are available to them to extend BC/DR to additional applications and business locations.  Here again, though, it is important to do your homework when comparing vendor options.