Articoli

By Maurice (Moe) Donegan

With the unprecedented financial challenges facing business, IT organizations have embraced the cost-saving merits of virtualization to consolidate servers. While this is laudable, server consolidation is just one dimension of virtualization. To better understand the larger issues at stake, we should review how IT solutions came to be silos of limited agility.

In a larger context, the growth in IT infrastructure was an innovative response to business demand. Like other compelling technological imperatives, IT provided significant value with automated solutions designed to advance the state of the business mission. In the short-run, some solutions yielded cost savings through staff reduction, but in the long-run they improved overall business productivity while enabling new opportunity. Along the way, IT solutions matured into a dependent relationship with specific hardware and software environments. The required growth in more diverse environment configurations increasingly consumed a larger percentage of the IT budget while lowering resource utilization, thus lowering the overall return on investment. This diversity placed the additional burden of complex operations with low interoperability. Thus through robust adoption across many different environments, IT’s successes have become IT’s silo prison: inflexible domains with limited agility.

Clearly the nature of virtualization presents an opportunity to simplify IT’s physical infrastructure by consolidating server hardware, but doesn’t that fall short of true IT innovation? In a "bare bones" implementation, virtualization provides consolidation of differentiated tasks in related OS environments on a single server; however, inherent hypervisors lack the ability to monitor performance or operations management of the IT solutions across a wide heterogeneous infrastructure at an enterprise level. Moreover one implementation will give way to many unilateral server deployments throughout the enterprise. This unregulated virtual sprawl is a prominent management challenge, leaving IT to retrace and recapture this solution-gone-wild.

Virtualization to consolidate servers without consideration to the larger enterprise IT management issues, is a lost opportunity. For enterprise virtualization to thrive beyond consolidation it must reconcile with larger IT visions of improved infrastructure agility, service quality and operational efficiency while reducing business risk from IT failure. Enterprise virtualization should transcend server consolidation to transform IT management, providing increased return-on-investment and regained control of IT service to the business mission.

Realizing the importance of the larger IT vision, CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategy provides Enterprise Virtualization Management solutions that span the IT infrastructure to bridge virtualization capability with policy-based process automation, security, performance monitoring and financial and configuration management. It enables a cohesive, measured and standardized approach to virtualization across the enterprise. CA’s Enterprise Virtualization Management joins IT and business requirements with the market-leading virtualization hypervisor and hardware vendors, for a unified resource view of virtualization as an enterprise discipline within the context of comprehensive data-center management and automation.

Improved Agility and Speed with Seamless Integration

At the core of CA’s Enterprise Virtualization Management is the automation necessary to provision, manage and deprovision physical and virtual processing resources tailored to the evolving needs of business. By monitoring real-time application performance (with comparison to utilization trends), tracking the on-going workload schedule and applying policy-based management Enterprise Virtualization Management dynamically optimizes the IT infrastructure to achieve enterprise goals with extreme agility.

However, automation is only one aspect; the effective enterprise virtualization management comes from seamless integration of virtualization disciplines with cornerstone data-center operations, service quality and performance-management capability. This enables rapid production release of dynamic physical, virtual and cloud capacity to meet business needs, along with the cost chargeback, and configuration management across the enterprise.

Improved Service Quality

CA’s Enterprise Virtualization Management effectively integrates configuration management to share discovery of virtualized resources, enabling capacity planning and comprehensive measurement of IT service quality. This unified enterprise configuration view extends the virtualization reach beyond servers into other major infrastructure elements such as networks, applications and desktops. By treating the IT infrastructure as an enterprise asset, virtualization integrates performance, availability and service levels with real-time production responses to improve virtualization service quality and effectiveness.

Increase in Efficiency

Automation and integration enable CA’s Enterprise Virtualization Management to streamline processes and labor and resource utilization quickly, flexibly and efficiently. Data-center costs are accurately reflected through chargeback, capacity planning is accomplished through comprehensive trend analysis and energy consumption is conserved to actual business need. By viewing IT infrastructure through an enterprise view, enterprise virtualization management exploits processing capacity across distributed, mainframe and cloud platforms providing enterprise gains in IT efficiency.

Reduced Risk

To be sure that the gains of virtualization are not offset by unwarranted increases in business risk, CA’s Enterprise Virtualization Management provides IT with the tools to extend security policy throughout the virtualized environments. This is accomplished by implementing virtual access controls that leverage a centralized access-entitlement-rights management, which allows virtual environment provisioning to occur flexibly while maintaining appropriate IT security that meets and exceeds compliance needs.

Clearly the arguments for implementing virtualization are compelling and merit IT investment; however, in the face of a volatile financial environment, IT must go beyond a “bare bones” server consolidation. Implemented properly, Enterprise Virtualization Management provides the near-term benefits of server consolidation with the longer-term benefits from improved IT management, agility, service levels, operational efficiency and business risk reduction.