IT departments are under constant pressure to deliver more services at lower costs, increase performance and manage fewer systems, which has lead to an increasing interest in data center consolidation through virtualization.

Enterprises are turning to data center consolidation in order to cut IT costs, tighten security, meet regulatory requirements and improve operational efficiencies. Consolidation yields savings by reducing equipment and floor space costs, cutting software licenses and distribution costs, and reducing operations and maintenance expenses.

Businesses are employing virtualization to manage server sprawl, data growth, growing power consumption and complex infrastructures. Virtualization allows different users to share the same physical infrastructure, such as storage, servers, services and network elements, to provide efficient use of network resources. Virtualization also reduces the cost of operation and acquisition.

Today's data center features individual systems of server load balancing, firewall, intrusion detection/prevention system, SSL acceleration, application switching and acceleration, and XML acceleration. This approach can be expensive, not just in terms of purchasing individual systems, but in installing, managing, maintaining, scaling, debugging and provisioning of each individual system. There is also a learning curve when IT personnel are required to manage systems from multiple vendors.

Consolidated platforms can combine firewall, intrusion detection/prevention system, antivirus, encryption and URL filtering into a single platform. Besides offering IT professionals an advantage in effectively managing services on a single platform, the tight integration of functions and features give customers better control of the network.

These platforms may be inadequate in addressing the next generation of data centers, however, because they lack the ability to manage intelligent services for multiple business units.

Next-generation platforms need to be able to address the trend of consolidated data centers. Data center managers expect products to be high-performance, scalable, flexible and modular, with "true" intelligent service virtualization capability. True virtualization of intelligent services, such as firewall, application switching and acceleration, SSL, and XML acceleration can be selectively combined and mapped for one or multiple business units in the enterprise data center.

What is more important is the ability to provision these services on the fly. Historically, provisioning was a time-consuming process; new platforms are expected to reduce provisioning time to hours.

As enterprises move to make use of virtualization technologies to consolidate data centers, capital expenditures, operating expenses, and power and cooling costs are major considerations.

Capital expenditures come into play as IT determines the requirements for performance, features, type of intelligent services, number of users to support and future needs. Systems that can offer true intelligent service virtualization will replace the need for multiple appliances, lower the cost of redundancy and, once installed, new users can be brought online with a simple configuration and no additional expenditures. This investment-protection approach, where upgrading and scaling functions/services and bandwidth as business grows is simple offers savings over the traditional solutions offered today.

Operating expenses are often overlooked when purchasing a system. A virtualized system means fewer systems to manage and deploy, quicker and simpler time-to-service deployment, network simplicity and reduced rack space. True virtualization of intelligent services will allow enterprise data centers to provide virtual security, application switching and acceleration services, saving even more costs.

Server virtualization reduces power and cooling consumption, and also requires fewer systems, thus reducing power and cooling needs even more. The actual savings multiply as the number of true virtual services increase.

Rami Rammaha is the Ethernet marketing manager at Nortel, Toronto, Canada.

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