Executive Viewpoint: Erik Swan, Splunk

By Erik Swan
published: Tuesday, December 09 2008

Managing the Chaos of a Virtualized Data Center

IT Search: Helping to Maximize the Value of Virtualization in 2009

As the current economic landscape persists into 2009, virtualization will play a role in reducing the cost and complexity of data center deployments.  Virtualization itself is meant to enable companies to make better use of their resources, allowing for cost reduction in the data center.  Yet contrary to popular belief, achieving better efficiency is not as simple as implementing virtualized hosts or replacing outdated servers within an IT environment.

Shifting to a virtualized infrastructure can ultimately hinder data simplification by creating a chaotic set of new challenges, which must be addressed but are not so easily solved. For example, in this newly created environment, business leaders will likely lack clarity about how to promptly find, access and collect data without the intervention of IT, leading to productivity drains, slowdowns and potential a negative impact on business drivers.   As a result, in 2009 IT managers will be seeking a way to better manage their virtualized environments in order to reel in and reduce the costs associated with maximizing the performance of the virtualized infrastructure.

If data is forced to remain static, unorganized and unstructured within siloed technology systems, how can a CIO begin to scratch the surface of controlling costs and efficiency of a data center? The short answer is they cannot without knowing precisely what data is being delivered and received across a data center, which can affect the business in some way. The information is simply too valuable to remain dormant. IT Search technologies allow IT professionals to easily manage the data produced within their infrastructure by not only navigating the information available, but also troubleshooting problems quickly and efficiently, in real time.   With multiple virtual machines (VMs) sharing a pool of server, storage and network resources, changes to any one layer or VM could potentially affect others - and the applications they contain.  Indexing data across every tier of the infrastructure in real time through IT Search is one solution that IT managers will likely seek in '09 to alleviate the challenges of managing these dynamic IT environments.

IT Search allows IT professionals to navigate and trace performance problems and errors across all components of the infrastructure, highlighting visibility across VMs and resource competition issues.  By breaking down the silos created by virtualized hosts, IT Search provides the visibility and enables the control needed to manage a virtual environment.  In this time of economic uncertainty where IT budgets are under even more scrutiny, the expectations around data center performance will continue to rise. Without an IT Search technology in place to manage, maintain and cost-effectively grow the data center, both IT organizations and their companies, as a whole, run the risk of falling behind.

Let's face it, virtualization is here to stay. But the question is whether you will be able to control and maximize your virtualized environment while reducing the cost associated with management, or will you let virtualization control you? 

Splunk

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