Finding the Pillars of Virtualization

Hi my name is Brett Williams – I’m the focus owner for datacenter and virtualization on the War on Cost team and like my colleagues will be a regular contributor to this Itbizval blog. 

Currently I’m on a search for Automation, Consolidation, and Integration being used together.  My goal is to find them being leveraged to manage Virtualization.

Why ?

In one view they are three very well known and straight forward strategies that assist to drive costs lower , increase availability, address governance, manage compliance and decrease risk. In another perspective they are the core parts to making the virtualization excitement and focus real.

Considering the strategies above individually there are many specific incremental benefits that can be achieved. Each strategy has a range of fundamental processes, and technology that can be applied effectively.

Combined they form a core framework for managing the increasingly complex and important role of the datacenter – the central component in the delivery of the business services and capabilities required in today’s volatile and challenging economy. Unfortunately cost inefficiencies and service inflexibility are commonplace. So the question becomes what is really the reality of these strategies and how are they impactful? What can a customer take and really use ?

Again these are a strong clear messages that are widely known. They are not new. They should be being followed.

Unfortunately our recent research findings on datacenter operations don't provide a rosy picture. In fact what we have uncovered is that there are many fundamental IT processes that are not being adopted by organizations and that failure to adopt has a direct impact on operational costs.

Match that failure to adopt fundamental processes back to the three pillars we are discussing and it is clear there is real scope for change in the somewhat untouched datacenter world. Its not just all about green IT or environment management, the latest hardware or even a software feature compete - its also about managing what should be fundamental services efficiently.

Now let's try and understand how Virtualization comes into this story.

How are these strategies being used to benefit Virtualization ? Are they relevant ? – what effect could they have ? All questions that are very important to have answers for. To do this - over the next few blog updates I’m going to drill into our data and outline the key findings observed and the impact of the the three strategies above.

And yes I do consider that virtualization is the key to the future for datacenters….

Brett

If you want to discuss this in more detail – or can our team provide guidance to help you with a customer discussion or question please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at (brettw@microsoft.com)