Virtually Right

With a private cloud strategy and dynamic data center you can quickly respond to rapid business fluctuations. But how do you get there? Gregor Petri, Advisor, CA Technologies, discusses ideal approaches for building a dynamic data center that not only address complexity and reduce cost, but also accelerate business response time, to ensure that your organization realizes the true promise of cloud computing, business agility and customer responsiveness.

Cloud computing presents an appealing model for offering and managing IT services through shared and often virtualized infrastructure. It’s great for new business start-ups who don’t want the risk of a large on-premise technology investment, or organizations who can’t easily predict what the future demand will be for their services. But for most of us with existing infrastructure and resources, the picture is very different. We want to capitalize on the benefits of the cloud ― on demand, low risk, affordable computing ― but we’ve spent years investing in rooms stacked high with hardware and software to run our daily mission critical jobs and services.

So how do organizations in this situation make the shift from straight-forward server consolidation to a dynamic, self-service virtualized data center? How do they reach the peak of standardized IT service delivery and agility that is in step with the needs of the business? Many virtualization deployments stall as organizations stop to deal with challenges like added complexity, staffing requirements, SLA management, or departmental politics. This “VM stall” tends to coincide with different stages in the virtualization maturity lifecycle, such as the transition from tier 2/3 server consolidation to mission-critical tier 1 applications, and from basic provisioning automation to a private/hybrid cloud approach.

The Virtualization Maturity Lifecycle

The simple answer is to take it step-by-step, learning as you go, building maturity at every step. This will earn you the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to progress from an entry-level virtualization project to a mature dynamic data center and private cloud strategy.

It’s called the virtualization maturity lifecycle, and it builds in four steps. Just like pilots start their training on small planes (going full cycle from take-off to landing) before they move onto large commercial jets, it is advisable for organizations to implement these virtualization maturity steps iteratively. For example, start a full maturity cycle on test and development servers before moving to mission critical servers and applications.

Start easy, by consolidating servers, to increase utilization and reduce your current carbon footprint. To ensure deep insight and continuity in support of the migration from physical to virtual, you might want to leverage image backup and physical-to-virtual restore tools that allow you to move your physical IBM, Dell and HP images directly to ready to run VM images for VMware, Sun, Citrix and Microsoft.

The next step involves optimizing the infrastructure. Apart from maintaining consistency, efficiency, and compliance across the virtual resources (which is proving fast to be even more complex in virtual than in physical environments), we analyze, monitor, (re-)distribute and tune our applications and services.