Venyu Blog

In part 1 of this two-part post we examined the findings of Judith Davis and Robert Eve authors of Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility who have produced what they believe to be the first book written on the topic of data virtualization. Their work includes ten real-world case studies that demonstrate, courtesy of its Amazon blurb, “the significant value and tangible business agility benefits that can be achieved through the implementation of data virtualization solutions.”

In this entry we’ll look some of those benefits, beginning with research independent of the authors’ findings.

For example, in his article “Complex Choices” in the hard copy edition of Information Week’s October 31 issue author Charles Babcock finds that in spite of a virtualization’s challenges in finding purchase in the data center, virtualization keeps expanding. According to the publication’s 2011 Virtualization Management Survey, 63% of 396 companies surveyed plan to have half or more of their servers virtualized by the end of 2012.Even production systems once off limits, are now routinely virtualized to allow for more flexible management – to improve availability, load balance to meet peak demands and provide easier disaster recovery. 

But those aren’t all of the reasons.

In his recent post “Top 10 benefits of server virtualization” David Marshall of InfoWorld suggests that server virtualization has been a “game-changing technology for IT, providing efficiencies and capabilities that just aren’t possible when constrained within a physical world. As evidence he points to a top 10 list of benefits that have accrued to organizations since the advent of server virtualization approximately 10 years ago. These include:

10. Save energy, go green. Migrating physical servers over to virtual machines and then consolidating them onto far fewer physical servers means lowering monthly power and cooling costs in the data center. This was an early victory chant for server virtualization vendors back in the early part of 2000, and it still holds true today.

9. Reduce the data center footprint. In addition to saving more of your company’s green with a smaller energy footprint, server consolidation with virtualization will also reduce the overall footprint of your entire data center. That means far fewer servers, less networking gear, a smaller number of racks needed, etc. — all of which translates into less data center floor space required..  

8. QA/lab environments. Virtualization allows you to easily build out a self-contained lab or test environment, operating on its own isolated network. While this is probably way more lab than you’d ever actually need in your own environment, you can see how building something like this would be cost prohibitive with purely physical servers, and in many cases, technologically improbable.

7. Faster server provisioning. Imagine being able to provide your business units with near instant-on capacity when a request comes down the chain. Server virtualization enables elastic capacity to provide system provisioning and deployment at a moment’s notice. You can quickly clone a gold image, master template, or existing virtual machine to get a server up and running within minutes.

6. Reduce hardware vendor lock-in. Because server virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware and replaces it with virtual hardware, data center managers and owners gain a lot more flexibility when it comes to the server equipment they can choose from.

5. Increase uptime. Most server virtualization platforms now offer a number of advanced features that just aren’t found on physical servers, including capabilities such as live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability, and distributed resource scheduling. The ability to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from one server to another is perhaps one of the greatest single benefits of virtualization with far-reaching uses.

4. Improve disaster recovery. Virtualization offers an organization three important components when it comes to building out a disaster recovery solution. The first is its hardware abstraction capability. By removing the dependency on a particular hardware vendor or server model, a disaster recovery site no longer needs to keep identical hardware on hand to match the production environment; and IT can save money by buying cheaper hardware in the DR site since it rarely gets used. Second, by consolidating servers down to fewer physical machines in production, an organization can more easily create an affordable replication site. And third, most enterprise server virtualization platforms have software that can help automate the failover when a disaster does strike.

3. Isolate applications. Server virtualization provides application isolation and removes application compatibility issues by consolidating many of these virtual machines across far fewer physical servers. This also cuts down on server waste by more fully utilizing the physical server resources and by provisioning virtual machines with the exact amount of CPU, memory, and storage resources that it needs.

2. Extend the life of older applications. This is specifically in consideration of legacy applications still running in your environment but incapable of running on a modern operating system, on newer hardware or the person who created it is no longer around to update it. By virtualizing and encapsulating the application and its environment, you can extend its life, maintain uptime, and finally get rid of that old Pentium machine hidden in the corner of the data center.

 1. Help move things to the cloud. By virtualizing your servers and abstracting away the underlying hardware, you are preparing yourself for a move into the cloud. In fact, as the public cloud matures, as the technology around it advances and you become more comfortable with the thought of moving data out of your data center and into a cloud hosting facility, you will have had a head start in getting there. And the journey along the way will have better prepared you and the organization.

Finally, if you need even more help in making the business case to your management team or CIO, of course you can contact Venyu today.