Gaining on a World of Virtualised Simplicity

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As more and more organizations look for simplicity in their approach towards solving IT issues and problems, Virtualization is a key strategy for simplifying deployment of IT resources and maximizing their utilization.

Virtualization refers to the concept of abstracting physical resources such as compute cycles, data storage, and network bandwidth, and then provisioning and sharing these resources amongst multiple applications.

In a virtualized world where simplicity rules, a single server may be “virtualized” to allow multiple operating system (OS) images to run concurrently. Most importantly, the amount of storage available to a user on a Storage Area Network (SAN) may be dynamically adjusted on the fly and additionally the amount of bandwidth allocated to a given application may be boosted or reduced as required in a scenario.

It is interesting to note that as a concept, Virtualization began as a niche market but is rapidly gaining acceptance as the preferred way to manage and provision system resources within a network.

Today the benefits of virtualization are well understood by the channel partner or the system integrator community in India. System administrators are able to capture underutilized resources and re-allocate them to constrained applications. In a virtualized world, resources can be dynamically allocated and load-balanced as the characteristics of traffic and applications change over time.

Additionally, hardware can also be transparently replaced or upgraded with a minimum of downtime. Utilizing existing resources more efficiently in this way leads to reduced infrastructure cost, better utilization of IT assets, lower power consumption, reduced cooling requirements, and inevitably lower total cost of ownership.

Today, server virtualization is primarily handled through specialized software provided by vendors such as VMware. The success of virtualisation technology has led system integrators to think about ways to increase virtualization’s effectiveness by extending the same concepts to the hardware level as well. This concept is catching on in India as well.

Global chip heavyweights such as Intel, with its Virtual Technology Vanderpool, and AMD, with “Pacifica”, are implementing virtualization-specific features in their CPUs. Following along the same line, input/output (I/O) architectures are now being redesigned to support this powerful concept of virtualization from end to end, with the introduction of hardware-based I/O virtualization, commonly referred to as IOV. As organizations look to reduce their overall IT spend, virtualization is coming to the rescue of IT managers and CIOs in this regard and is likely to increase on its popularity in the coming months and years to come.