Executive Viewpoint: Andrew Hillier, CiRBA

By Andrew Hillier
published: Tuesday, December 02 2008

Virtualization is in the process of disrupting the traditional order within IT, and the economic downturn is increasing pressure on this already volatile situation.  In addition to this, the ever-growing list of viable virtualization technologies increases complexity and confusion about where organizations need to take consolidation and virtualization and how they can do it safely and quickly.

Greater Scrutiny in Technology Selection & Increased Focus on ROI

The proliferation of viable technology choices in the virtualization world will start to complicate the decision making process.  This will underscore the need for quantitative ways of evaluating options, understanding the financial impact and justifying decisions. The days of simply cutting a PO to the default vendor will be gone.

This trend will be compounded by the economic downturn, which will cause a high priority to be placed on exploiting proven cost cutting measures.  Ultimately, virtualization planning will become a much more rigorous process that will need to have clearly communicated plans and goals that are underpinned by solid analysis.  Put another way, as virtualization enters grade two there will be a lot more homework, there will be fewer games where everyone is a winner, and there will be a lot more people reading the report cards.

Proactive Management Back on the Agenda

This decline of the grass-roots, best-efforts approach to virtualization will also spill over into the long-term management of virtual environments.  Capacity planning in physical environments has traditionally focused on forward-looking modeling of supply and demand.  In many environments, that has resulted in formal processes designed to capture business knowledge of future demands and combine this with actual measurements and observed trends in order to be able to plan for the upcoming requirements.

Virtual environments, on the other hand, often introduce the ability to "move" workloads to align supply and demand, which can tend to bypass more process-driven approaches and create situations where environments become very fluid and reactive.  While this is very powerful in certain situations, spontaneity is generally not a good thing in the data center, and the coming year will see the pendulum start to swing away from purely reactive models of capacity management back toward proactive planning approaches.

Revisiting the Fundamentals

Combined, these two effects mean that the path forward will include increased diligence when adopting virtualization technologies and improved mechanisms to plan for the future.  While these steps may seem rather fundamental, it is important to remember that the fundamentals count when managing production environments, and this becomes especially true in a rapidly changing market filled with hype, uncertainty, choice and frugality.

CiRBA

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