HP's Nick van der Zweep: The case for a holistic approach to virtualization
HP's Nick van der Zweep: The case for a holistic approach to virtualization
By Nick van der Zweep published: Friday, October 21 2005
If a colleague told you that his ideas for improving the company were to triple the number of employees, double all their salaries, limit each staff member to one specific task, and build ornate walls between departments, you might suggest he find another line of work. But the same under-utilization, over-provisioning and lack of resource-sharing are commonplace in many data centers, with rigid silos of computing and human resources dedicated to specific applications or business processes.
Fortunately, virtualization can help address these issues head-on, enabling the kind of business agility most companies need to remain competitive in today’s markets. By pooling and sharing computing resources, companies are able to focus on the services delivered by IT as opposed to the systems that provide those services.
But not all companies are at equal levels of readiness to introduce virtualization into their environments, nor will one virtualization strategy deliver optimal results for different companies. In addressing virtualization, it is critical to take a holistic approach that includes a realistic assessment of the level of virtualization a company is able to adopt, as well as looking beyond simply servers or storage to the people, processes and technologies in the picture. As with many solutions, the higher the degree of virtualization that can be introduced into a system, the greater the benefit that can be delivered to a company’s personnel, and its bottom line. There are three distinct degrees of virtualization companies can consider.
In element virtualization, individual servers, networks, storage or clients are optimized to meet the demand of a particular application environment or business process. In multi-server environments, for example, clustering, partitioning, workload management and other virtualization techniques can be applied to configure servers as reusable pools of resources. To better align costs with fluctuations in server utilization, utility pricing and pay-per-use plans are solid first steps towards a more utility-like model.
For many companies today, element virtualization is likely already at work somewhere, as it offers an easy and practical first step in such forms as server partitioning or storage pooling. The value-add in cost savings and flexibility at this stage are incremental, commensurate with the elements that are virtualized.
If you think of virtualization as an evolutionary process, element virtualization also plays an important educational role. Some departments or personnel may have initial resistance to the idea of sharing resources with other departments, or even across business applications within a particular department. Element virtualization is often less disruptive and more transparent than higher degrees and makes for an easier adjustment to sharing IT resources.
Equally important, element virtualization should serve as the starting point to get enterprises thinking less about the slicing and dicing of devices, and more about meeting service level agreements. It allows them to begin to learn about how IT and business processes need to be adjusted when the infrastructure that supports them is shared rather than owned.
Integrated virtualization optimizes multiple elements to automatically meet service level agreements, extending the value that virtualization techniques can bring to the enterprise. Integrated design facilitates advanced features, such as automated policy-based deployment and provisioning, auto-failover protection and advanced workload management across the entire infrastructure. Integrated virtualization solutions can also be applied, for example, to structure networks with a business focus by creating compartments based on shared business needs of applications or systems.
Virtual server environments, as another example, maximize the effectiveness of server virtualization by applying policies to allocate server resources to the most important business applications. Server resource utilization is optimized in real time according to business priorities, and virtual servers automatically shrink and grow based on service level objectives set for each application they host.
Integrated virtualization, moving toward a utility scenario, requires an important personnel component. The more advanced virtualization becomes, the more important it is to secure executive level commitment. Moves toward more advanced virtualization are frequently inspired by business-critical issues for which senior management is responsible, and such management support can be essential to gaining business support for delivery of IT as a service based on a shared infrastructure.
In the complete IT utility scenario, resources are pooled and shared across applications and business processes so supply meets demand in real time. Complete IT utility sits at the apex, leveraging virtualization, management and automation together to maximize the infrastructure and the resources it provides. It is a model of IT delivered as real-time services.
Companies can build their own IT utility, investigate outsourcing as a feasible option or do a combination of both. But not all outsourcers are capable of taking over the sharing and pooling of IT resources for enterprise customers. A careful and comprehensive qualification process is advisable.
To maximize the efficiencies and flexibilities promised by virtualization technology, companies must clearly consider how a pooled, shared infrastructure will affect their people and processes. In most companies, people, processes and technologies are dedicated to applications or business functions. Issues of over-provisioning and fixed capacity and costs are present, as they are in infrastructure.
With a virtualized infrastructure, people, processes and technologies can be focused on meeting service levels, capacity can be allocated dynamically, resources can be optimized and the entire infrastructure is simplified and flexible.
To maximize the upside of virtualization, a holistic approach offers a realistic view and strategy for employing the right degree of virtualization for an infrastructure and business, and for achieving potential advantages across the people, processes and technologies that comprise that business.
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As Director of Virtualization and Integrity Server Software for HP, Nick van der Zweep spearheads all virtualization efforts on behalf of HP Technology Solutions Group. He is also responsible for software marketing for HP Business Critical Servers, including HP-UX 11i, OpenVMS, High Availability software and the HP Virtual Server Environment.
