Virtualisation and the Cloud

Dataplex have been undertaking virtualisation solutions for our clients for longer than I care to remember, and have had some pretty interesting projects along the way with a number of unique business drivers being the facilitator for these projects.

But there is a single buzz word that is used time and time again to describe why we are embarking on this journey - Cost Cutting (virtualisation is a consolidation technology), which of course it is, but this ultimately is a tactical deployment. Virtualisation is far more than just tactical and should be part of an overall strategic deployment.

Lets face it, in today's climate saving money is a good thing! But thinking strategically about virtualisation is not just about cost cutting but an enabler for flexible sourcing and cloud computing.

Whether or not you like the phrase cloud computing it looks here to stay, and virtualisation unlocks many doors to private, public and federated clouds through the following avenues:

1. Economies of scale through a multi tenanted architecture, its what the cloud providers do and its what you should be doing to.
2. Allows the IT department flexibility in sourcing and provisioning as the barriers to physical server implementation moves to an SLA and service provision architecture, with the option to provide cross departmental billing.
3. Virtualisation changes the culture of business and expectations, gone are the days of 4 week server lead times, deploying virtual machines can be done in a matter of a few clicks. This brings with it challenges in service uptime, provisioning and management all of which have been addressed by cloud providers.
4. Charge back has become a key play for many organisations as typically users demand more as they can get it faster than before. IT needs to focus more on usage accounting, and charge back.

So in review we have economies of scale, SLA/SOA, faster time to provision, multi tenanted architectures and billing on usage - is this not what cloud providers promise?

So if you started reading this thinking - "Cloud computing not for me thanks", maybe you are further down the cloud computing route than you thought, its an evolution:

Virtualisation>>Private Cloud>>Public Cloud>>Federation

For more on how Dataplex can help you understand and build your cloud architecture click here.