I've been doing a lot of reporting about data center consolidation lately, which means I've been talking to a lot of IT managers who are virtualizing servers. Almost all of them report seeing big savings in the capital expense of buying physical servers as well as the operating expenses of heating and cooling them.
When I asked if virtualization has reduced the costs of managing their servers, their answers are a mixed bag. In some cases, it seems, server virtualization actually makes management more complex, and thus might not be right for all customers.
I got an interesting perspective on this recently from Dave McCrory, chief technology officer at Hyper9, a 25 person startup in
Where management costs rise to troublesome levels, he says, is when the customer continually makes a lot of changes in the virtualized environment -- say, adding or removing servers, or moving applications among virtual servers as business needs change. (Not surprisingly, that's exactly the challenge that Hyper9 hopes to meet.)
For years, everyone from industry analysts to every major hardware and software vendor have been preaching about creating true, dynamic IT services, where business users can "dial up" processing, network and storage capacity as business needs change. Virtualization helps make that possible, but I get a headache imagining how to track virtual servers accessing virtualized storage over virtualized local and wide area networks. Just for starters, how do you make sure critical data and applications are secure when the underlying “plumbing” is in one big virtual pool? And how do you quickly find and fix problems when something goes wrong?
Regardless of whether Hyper9 has the right answer, they’re certainly asking the right question. Look for plenty of competition in this space as customers move beyond static, one-time virtualization and try for the Holy Grail of a true dynamic IT infrastructure.
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