Jonathan ClarkeJonathan Clarke


Despite considerable, tangible benefits – savings on hardware, power, cooling, floor space, software licences and maintenance as well as streamlined IT management and improved DR planning – organisations’ willingness to transform applications into virtualised environments is below expectations.

That’s according to Jonathan Clarke, alliances manager, EMC Southern Africa, who says organisations want to be sure of the outcome when virtualising mission-critical applications.

“Not surprisingly, companies are concerned about operational failure, uncertain about the support infrastructure, and are not confident that they have the skills and experience to make a transition happen on plan and within budget,” he says.

The primary objective when transforming applications to run on virtual machines in public or hybrid clouds is to gain value out of your most critical asset – information. Value such as speed, business agility, flexibility, management of growth, mobility, and the ability to make smarter business decisions.

However, effectively virtualising mission-critical applications requires a robust set of technologies that helps all elements of a virtual infrastructure work in concert to deliver greater flexibility, availability, and cost savings.

“No organisation should trust its mission-critical applications to an untested set of technologies,” Clarke says. “EMC recognises this and provides reference architectures and best practices based on well-tested configurations that cover a wide range of scenarios. EMC’s holistic view of the data centre encompasses strong integration with VMware and a broad portfolio of solutions, tools and reference architectures to help companies quickly provision new mission-critical applications and improve capacity utilisation in their organisations.” In effect, EMC provides validated solutions that help organisations virtualise mission-critical applications more quickly and effi ciently. These solutions help identify challenges and offer best practices developed to design the virtual environment, ensure business continuity, manage operations in a dynamic environment, back-up and archive a consolidated environment, and ensure and compliance.

Clarke says the most important skill EMC brings to virtualising enterprise applications is the company’s deep understanding of applications and virtual environments. “Both of these are required to optimise and get the most out of a virtual environment in terms of application performance, functionality, high availability, recoverability and manageability,” he points out.

“Speeding time to value, improving efficiency, and delivering higher quality of service are the key challenges for deploying mission-critical applications. Virtualising these applications is a must to handle the ever-increasing volumes of data with the lowest possible cost of ownership, and to deliver the agility needed to capitalise on new business opportunities.”

The local EMC Forum 2012 is taking place on 9 October 2012 at Gallagher Estate in Midrand. Attendance is free, so please register at www.southafrica.emc/forum.