Virtualisation boosts cost savings, agility Forester research shows that 35% of businesses in the UK are using virtualisation and another 16% are interested in doing so. This is according to Ivo Vegter, MC of the recent ITWeb-StorTech executive forum, held in partnership with Sun and Symantec.

The event focused on the virtualised enterprise and covered topics including building the virtualised enterprise, energy efficiency as an element of eco responsibility and the do`s and don`ts of standardisation in the data centre.

BUILDING A VIRTUALISED ENTERPRISE

StorTech CEO Tim Knowles said enterprise IT is under increasing pressure. "IT is under increasing pressure from business to deliver and demands from business in conjunction with a difficulty in planning for future project capacity requirements can lead to companies adopting virtualisation," says Knowles.

He noted there were many benefits to using server, storage and desktop virtualisation, including lower TCO, enhanced manageability and increased flexibility and responsiveness. Some of the key benefits of virtualisation, he said, are better infrastructure utilisation, agility and provisioning, reduced downtime, improved management and control and disaster recovery.

"A virtualised enterprise is one that is cost-effective, highly available and agile," he concluded.

IT MUST GO GREEN

Barry Bredenkamp, CEO of the National Energy Efficiency Agency (NEEA), noted that energy efficiency was an element of increasingly important eco responsibility and posed the question: "Is the IT industry going green?"

Bredenkamp spoke about the impact of the IT industry on power usage and looked at demand side management, a programme aimed at reducing consumer use of energy through conservation or efficiency measures, while maintaining or improving outputs. He said the IT industry contributes immensely to what he calls the `standby power` problem. "By reducing their standby power consumption the IT industry can make a significant contribution to the overall reduction of energy consumption," Bredenkamp said.

He held Sun up as an example of an IT company that is getting involved and developing a plan to reduce their power consumption. "The NEEA applauds Sun for their initiative and is working with them to implement the proposed solutions in SA."

STANDARDISING THE DATA CENTRE

Sheldon Hand, Symantec Africa`s pre sales consulting manager, in his discussion on standardising the data centre, looked at the challenges associated with managing solutions from multiple software vendors including everything from data protection, server management, and storage management, to application performance management. Hand says Symantec research shows some of the main challenges facing IT today are the cost of maintaining data centres, delivering on its SLAs with business, and keeping skilled IT staff. "Finally", says Hand, "the biggest challenge IT faces is that the data centre is becoming increasingly complex."

He added that consolidation and virtualisation, as well as automation and standardisation are solutions being used to face these challenges. Hand discussed the increasing complexity of the data centre in detail and looked at virtualisation and standardisation as means of combating this complexity.

"Complexity relates to inefficiency. If you reduce the complexity, there will be an increase in efficiency. Enter virtualisation and standardisation," Hand said.