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A recipe for success

An end-to-end approach to virtualisation and automated management processes provide the foundations for cloud computing.

Virtualisation has become an essential ingredient of every IT infrastructure. Adding virtual components to the technology mix, however, is just the first step. To ensure your organisation unlocks the maximum efficiency and financial benefits, you need to join up all the virtual dots - from the datacenter to the desktop.

Laying the right end-to-end virtual foundations is not only essential for improving business agility and cost control but also for enabling the adoption of optimal IT outsourcing strategies, such as cloud computing.

Neill Burton, Datacenter Solutions Director at Computacenter, comments: “Virtualisation is the first step towards increasing flexibility and aligning IT resources to business need. Although many organisations successfully implement virtualisation technologies, they then encounter operational challenges that diminish the overall business value and can lead to hidden costs.”

ROI goes untapped

Virtual server sprawl, network bottlenecks and inadequate management tools are just some of the issues experienced by companies after adopting virtualisation. For example, 88 per cent of companies cite network problems as hampering their virtualisation efforts in a survey by Loudhouse Research.

As a result of these and other post-implementation problems, companies are taking longer than expected to realise the maximum return on investment (ROI) from virtualisation. For example, a study by the National Computing Centre (NCC) revealed that only 36 per cent of companies believe they have achieved the expected ROI from server virtualisation, with 30 per cent citing the same for the desktop space.

“The benefits of virtualisation have become so widely accepted, that, in their eagerness to cut costs, many organisations skip some of the downstream, operational due diligence that should be applied to any IT project,” explains Burton. This is borne out by the NCC survey, which reveals that 15 per cent of companies embarking on server virtualisation programmes did not have an ROI case in place. 

Building an effective business case is essential for ensuring future funding for your virtualisation efforts. The server and desktop are just the beginning of the virtual journey – networking components, storage systems, security devices and applications will all be following in their wake. To ensure ongoing buy-in from the board, it’s important to be able to demonstrate the benefits of previous virtualisation projects.

Understanding the wider impact

Each of the technology gateways towards end-to-end virtualisation come with their own set of challenges. As Burton explains, “Companies need to factor in the impact of a virtual approach on other infrastructure components – for example the network - as well as core IT processes, such as change management, capacity planning and performance monitoring.”

Ideally these factors should be considered prior to deployment as part of the proof of concept process. Testing facilities, such as Computacenter’s Solutions Centre, enable businesses to assess the hidden costs and complexities that could be associated with virtualisation in a risk-free environment.

According to the NCC survey, 30 percent of organisations have experienced such hidden costs. One of the key areas often over-looked is operational management and control. Without a complete understanding of the day-to-day operating dynamics of a virtualised environment, it is possible to introduce additional cost unintentionally. For example, the sheer simplicity of creating a new virtualised environment can lead to an increase in provisioning and decommissioning effort if managed in the same way as in the ’physical’ world.

Cost-effective and repeatable management processes

The management and monitoring processes adopted for virtual environments can also have a significant impact on long-term cost control and how quickly the full ROI is realised. “Although virtualisation delivers immediate cost savings, organisations need to ensure they are tapping into the year-on-year financial benefits that come from effective and automated management,” says Burton.

Orchestration is an important enabler for effective management. For example, provisioning virtual machines can be greatly simplified by using pre-defined images and automated workflows. As a result hundreds of virtual machines can be provisioned in minutes rather than several hours, increasing the speed of response to business change.

From a datacenter perspective, it’s also worth considering the deployment of management tools that allow you to:
 

• Manage workloads across virtual machines, physical servers and stateless devices
• Collect information on energy and cooling consumption to enable power measurement, regulation and capping
• Monitor resource utilisation in real-time to maximise capacity and performance

Initiatives, such as the Vblock Infrastructure Packages developed by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, enable organisations to combine best practice management processes with robust server, storage and networking technologies in a pre-packaged solution.

“By approaching virtualisation as a fundamental, but not the only prerequisite to IT service optimisation, companies will be better placed to address today’s business challenges relating to cost containment and agility,” cites Burton

Stepping into the cloud

With effective management controls and an end-to-end approach to virtualisation in place, the next step for many companies is a private cloud.

Neil Muller, Director of Services and Solutions at Computacenter, commented: “Virtual environments provide the basis for the on-demand model that is so key to private clouds. By combining this with flexible financial models and infinitely scalable solutions and resources, organisations will have the foundations they need for delivering more agile and cost-effective IT services to the business.” 

As with virtualisation, one of the first major decisions when adopting cloud computing as part of an optimal IT outsourcing strategy is to determine what workloads to migrate to the new model.

To help organisations simplify this decision-making process, Computacenter has identified the common workloads most suited to a private cloud and is creating pre-built service offerings that can be adopted as part of a dedicated, blended or shared approach.

For example, email invariably operates as a standalone application for many organisations, and is therefore well suited to a cloud environment managed by an external provider. By taking this ‘outsourced’ approach, IT departments can eliminate the need to invest in a messaging infrastructure while still ensuring they receive a high level of service and support for what is a critical business application.

Other workloads can also be migrated to a managed cloud environment – both from a desktop and datacenter perspective.  Equally cost-effective, this approach enables organisations to access the flexible computing resources they need to respond to business events, such as mergers, and seasonal peaks in demand. 

“Although cloud computing is essentially an extension of traditional  outsourcing methods, organisations must address a number of unique operational challenges if they are to maximise the financial and flexibility benefits of this new model,” comments Muller. “By drawing on our 25 years’ experience of delivering IT services, our offerings remove the uncertainty around cloud computing and provide customers with a pragmatic and optimal IT outsourcing strategy that blends and aggregates a variety of models.”

This approach also enables organisations to address three of the key concerns surrounding cloud computing: data security, services levels and exit strategies. As Niels Roberts, a Project Director from EDF Energy, explains: “Working with a company like Computacenter enables companies to access the financial and flexibility benefits of the cloud-based model in a safe and secure way with service levels tailored to individual business needs.”

These benefits can only be fully realised through the implementation and effective management of robust virtualisation environments. By combining these robust and scalable foundations with an optimal IT outsourcing strategy, organisations will have all the ingredients they need to sharpen their business and drive profitable growth.