Welcome to Virtualize Today. Thanks for taking the time to visit.
As you read this, you may be asking yourself, why another “virtualization” blog? Aren’t there at least a few hundred thousand blogs (that’s an exaggeration) out there on this technology subject already? As a matter of fact, yes, there are. Many of the top blogs on virtualization are written by well respected members of the IT and media communities, and they offer the latest technology news out there on this subject. (I will be linking to several of them shortly.)
So, if that’s the case, why create this blog? Well, simply put, I hope many of you, business and tech geeks alike, will take the opportunity to read this blog, and use it as a resource to educate, and if necessary evangelize, your senior IT management and business operations counterparts on the merits of taking this technology seriously.
Many, including some CIOs I know, still look at virtualization as a “fringe” technology. How, or why, after nearly 10 years of the rapid evolution of this technology in the PC server world, would this still be the case? Well, as IT leaders and innovators, we haven’t done an effective job of communicating the real value proposition to business management. Most virtualization deployment or conversion projects in many IT departments fail to bring about the value for which they were originally signed off on.
In fact, as with many mis-directed “good intentions” in IT, virtualization deployment or conversion projects add a level of burden, uncertainty and volatility into the infrastructure, resulting in yet another “perceived” failure, which business operations must bear, now that IT is fully “committed” to it.
Want examples of their reactions to virtualization?
You have probably experienced one, or many, of these:
- Development departments blame poor performance of their applications, rightfully or wrongfully so, on the new “Virtual Servers”, rather then doing sufficient analysis to determine the correct cause.
- Sales and Marketing departments blame their failure to reach the proposed level of targeted responses on the web site which NOW seems to be “slower” in this new virtual infrastructure.
- P&L business leaders blame their missed goals on the IT department’s insistence on “converting a perfectly good server infrastructure to virtual”, which has added no real value, but rather resulted in 80% or higher human resource re-allocation during the project, causing less focus on the areas that could’ve had real impact on the bottom line, according to them.
- Accounting finds that the ERP package, now resting on brand new virtualized infrastructure, slows to a crawl several times throughout the day. The unprepared and untrained IT group, managing the “systems running on the virtual infrastructure”, simply states that “all of the Windows OS servers and Databases servers are running at normal levels, so it is not the systems”. Frustration in Accounting sets in, since they, as the customer, know that there has been an obvious change as to how their application performs.
This is not the case everywhere. But, after the last 5 years of mainstream acceptance of these virtualization platforms, starting with VMware, virtualization adoption is still at its infancy. Whether caused by an influx of products and platforms to choose from, causing confusion and fear of “vendor lock-in”, or a miscommunication of its real value and impact to the infrastructure now and in the future, CTOs and IT Directors are finding it more and more difficult to introduce this technology into the environment where it can make the greatest impact: Production.
So, hopefully, together with your comments and real-world experiences, we can work together to accelerate the acceptance and adoption of this technology, because for those of us who have experienced, virtualization is truly transformational, in all aspects of IT.
In the current economic conditions, most CFOs, CEOs and CIOs are asking the same question: How can this proposed deployment of, or conversion to, a Virtual Infrastructure impact the bottom line 12, 18 and 24 months from now?
I am confident that together we can answer this question, and many others, in a pragmatic fashion.
This is the state of the virtual infrastructure today.
-clikdude
