Red Shift Virtualization Drivers
November 6th, 2007 by Lou
Vladis’s Blog has just posted an entry on good and bad reasons to virtualize titled “Virtualisation, comfortable or tight trousers“. I’d like to elaborate on the subject a bit.
Vladis mentions several important drivers supported by measurable, direct IT operational cost reductions, typically enabled by:
- More efficient use of the existing server footprint through higher utilization,
- More efficient operations through reduction in the number of physical servers,
- Peak utilization of a large number of servers is low, and
- Reduction in power and space consumption.
The blog rightly recommends sticking to a “by the numbers” approach to determining suitability of your situation for virtualization, and also mentions the tools we have for helping customers with consolidation and virtualization planning. In fact, I happen to work for a customer facing group in Sun that focuses on this topic. We use these tools for customers on a daily basis.
Although “below the line” kinds of IT cost initiatives are typical, they are not the only good reason for what I prefer to call optimization. Why optimization? Because optimizing for direct IT cost metrics is a subset of the overall discipline of optimization, and a business may actually have other things it considers in the optimization equation.
Agility
Business concerns outside of IT may have strong impacts on optimization initiatives. The most prevalent drivers in this area revolve around needs to increase IT agility and capability to quickly meet business demands. The typical virtualization scenario here is the ability to deploy applications with configuration versus procurement; deploying a new application does not necessarily cause IT to go procure hardware, generally at least lowering the time to deploy new applications.
Strategic Advantage
Businesses that are able to lower barriers and costs to automate will create greater internal demand for new IT services. Businesses that operate with higher business capabilities derived from automation disadvantage their competition. This is a Red Shift thinking: IT is a competitive weapon.
Above the Line Thinking
The real ability of IT to accomplish these sorts of optimizations has a lot more to do with IT understanding their customers than technology, and some of the business process related issues can be somewhat stickier. IT departments that are structured entirely as cost centers are particularly disadvantaged: how does an IT department, constructed as a cost center, go about developing their department as a “business within a business” to better serve customer demand?
Being wildly successful with this sort of optimization requires more than bright ideas, it requires reconstructing the IT organization, IT thinking, and the IT financial model to support the effort and the revised thinking.
Nonetheless, success on the revenue side of the business equation starts simply. We, as IT professionals, need to stop looking at our feet. A lot of good flows from a little opportunity exploration, and in many cases, a simple by the numbers approach from the revenue side of the equation can quickly move mountains. Take a walk on the wild side, the Red Shift side, the making money side of the equation. Making the company money is a good and righteous lever.
consolidation, it consolidation, red shift, virtualization