Improving IT Compatibility, Application Provisioning and Management Through Virtualization Technologies
Improving IT Compatibility, Application Provisioning and Management Through Virtualization Technologies
By Lee Nicholls published: Friday, June 15 2007
By Lee Nicholls, Global Solutions Director at Getronics
It's a fair assumption that in the enterprise space, most organizations’ strategies now focus on using IT as more of a business asset than a mere service to the company. As such, many organizations are increasing IT spending in areas such as unified communications and collaboration, then extending beyond, into business process improvement. Two noticeable work trends emerge from this approach: the first being the need to consolidate platform IT in the workspace, and standardize on core productivity toolsets such as the Windows client operating system, currently Windows Vista, and the Office family of products from Microsoft. The second is to improve core business via IT application services, with more business focused tools such as SAP and Siebel for workforce and sales management.
To deliver on this business trend, more and more organizations are using virtualization technologies to combat issues raised by compliance needs, distribution and compatibility.
Within the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors especially, the need to meet compliance regulations set out by governments and official regulatory bodies, such as the US FDA, across the globe have driven IT departments to begin reviewing virtualization tools to monitor and manage licensing and software asset ownership. Tools such as Microsoft's SoftGrid can be implemented to track the usage and installed instances of software, no matter the vendor. This gives IT departments within organizations a great deal of reporting capability not only to meet compliance regulations in reporting on legitimate licensing levels, but also a great deal of granularity on business usage, allowing for smarter investments when licenses are renewed. Specifically, this allows both for potential cost savings in unused licenses, and business growth in tracking the usage of new tools and systems.
Virtualization is also being implemented to free up a great deal of an IT department’s time for major projects such as software migrations or major operating system changes. As a rule of thumb, an IT Department managing a migration in house within a medium sized enterprise can expect to spend a total of 6-8 months of project time in planning, design and ultimately delivery, in migration from one generation of an operating system (or major productivity tool such as MS Office or SAP). In addition to this large piece of project work, applications must be tested and reviewed for compatibility to ensure the business still functions post-migration. A typical application can often take several weeks of testing and packaging before it is distributed with a new operating system (OS), adding further time, cost and unnecessary burden onto the IT professionals within the organization. As an additional point, typically a company will follow a 3-4 year migration cycle between generations of operating system, meaning this whole exercise has to be repeated in house some years later making a five year IT business plan include a tremendous amount of labor cost simply in migration, testing and packaging work.
Virtualization technologies allow companies to greatly decrease the risk and cost of this activity during migration and future migrations, Microsoft SoftGrid, for example, works in a very similar way to most application virtualization tools. Each application required to run on an organization’s standardized operating system image, is packaged into a SoftGrid component. This special package behaves much like a bubble, shielding the application from its physical environment and providing virtual connections that allow the application to function as if it was operating from its original legacy platform. For example, an organization wishing to install Microsoft Word 2003 on the same client as, say, Microsoft Office 2007 would likely run into some serious compatibility issues due to file replacement and sharing. To overcome this problem, the Word 2003 component can be placed into a SoftGrid "bubble" and delivered to the user via Microsoft SMS 2003 or the upcoming SCCM 2007, allowing the user to continue to work with older business tools.
In addition to overcoming the obvious compatibility, packaging and compliance issues, virtualization technologies deliver cost savings in overall application provisioning and management. Microsoft's SoftGrid solution is by far the most mature product in this space allowing seamless integration with SMS 2003 and provision applications across the network on demand to specific users. An application can be installed in whole, or in part - allowing for fast delivery and access depending on the level of functionality the user requires. For example, a user based at home accessing information over a slower broadband connection will not want to wait for the entire Outlook 2007 application to be installed before it can be used. With the packet streaming technology delivered by SoftGrid, the user can be up and running whilst Outlook continues to install in the background. In fact, some features can even be installed on demand only, allowing for a smaller application footprint.
While virtualization can significantly help IT organizations to address compliance and compatibility issues, moving to a virtual application structure does not happen without some business pain. Applications still have to find their way into virtual services and continue to be managed from within the host server platform; IT still has to get the application into that SoftGrid "bubble," which still takes a number of days and some fairly specialist skills that are not commonly found within the IT departments of most enterprises. However, most major service integrators and workspace management companies are meeting this challenge with a range of services designed to help organizations get to a future ready state, where the core business applications are moved into their virtual hosted environments and are ready for ongoing simple management by an organization’s existing IT pros. Workspace management companies and outsourcers in particular provide hosted solutions where their customers can effectively give up the problem of application provisioning and management for good. Instead management companies can centrally manage the process from data centers.
As more customers consolidate applications and more service integrators move to providing hosted data center models and faster, more detailed provisioning processes, extra pressures are being placed on software providers such as Microsoft and Altiris to improve the flexibility of their tools. At the present, making the business choice to move to a virtual platform is still an expensive process, and not without risk or complication. Even with declining software costs, it is still only a truly relevant solution to large organizations with larger legacy application estates, where numbers of applications run into the thousands and the management challenges run into millions in IT Labor. In order to start bringing this technology to small enterprise, or small to medium business (and even consumers), technology improvements need to happen in both ease of use, delivery and integration. If Microsoft wants to avoid slow uptake of future operating systems, which will ultimately replace Windows Vista, and answer some of the criticism leveled at compatibility issues with Windows XP and Windows 2000, a focus on an application and virtual strategy will be required.
Lee Nicholls is Global Solutions Director at Getronics, a USD $3.4 billion international provider of IT services and solutions that provides expertise in workspace management, applications, consulting and transformation services.
