Virtualization
Virtualization offers data center
savings
by Rami Rammaha
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.
For more information
(click here)