Dynamic IT

At Microsoft, we see virtualization as a means of enabling our vision of Dynamic IT, where people and computers get the resources they need the moment they need them. Dynamic IT systems have the flexibility, intelligence, speed and power to adapt to changing business conditions.

In order to achieve Dynamic IT, companies need a virtualization strategy that mobilizes and manages the resources of the entire infrastructure, both virtual and physical, to meet fast-moving business demands. The right virtualization strategy can enable IT to deliver faster and more reliable service, free up critical resources to address larger business goals, reduce costs, and ultimately achieve a greater competitive advantage through business agility.

Case in Point

One company that benefited from this improved flexibility is The SCOOTER Store, the leading U.S. supplier of power mobility devices. Changing government mandates and rapidly expanding market opportunity made business agility one of the company's key goals.

To make IT more of a strategic asset for the business, the company needed to reduce hardware costs and the labor associated with the administration, provisioning, and maintenance of its physical servers. Its IT staff also wanted to set up a mirrored staging and integration environment to develop and test new applications while minimizing downtime. With a Microsoft server virtualization solution and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, The SCOOTER Store is cutting the number of physical servers by 59 percent, even with a significant increase in the number of applications supported. Staff time spent on reactive maintenance is expected to drop by 65%, saving the company nearly $200,000 per year.

Richard Webster, the manager of systems and storage at The SCOOTER Store, has explained that his group chose Microsoft's solution over its competitors because no one else offered "a holistic approach to managing our IT environment. We're using System Center Virtual Machine Manager to automatically provision servers; we also have the ability to set up scheduling and load-balance one server against another."

Conclusion

The trend is clear: virtualization is here to stay. The real power of virtualization comes when companies implement an integrated virtualization strategy that extends across their entire IT infrastructure, along with management solutions that span both their desktop and data center resources - both virtual and physical. Only then can they effectively leverage virtualization as a building block for Dynamic IT. Simply put, management is the key to unlocking virtualization's true potential.