ITIL - itSMF International

feature subject
Green I.T. special FEATURE
Virtualisation:
overcoming the problems
The promise of better use of resources, lower costs and potential reduction to
both power costs and real estate is providing a compelling reason to move towards
virtualisation. But the virtual data centre raises some significant new issues in areas
of performance, compliance and security says Dwayne Melancon, VP corporate and
business development, Tripwire.
While the physical infrastructure
provides a clear view of individual
component performance, virtualisation
removes that transparency. Without visibility of
the virtualisation engine organisations cannot
identify potential security loopholes, ensure
system changes do not affect performance or
be confident in compliance to regulations such
as Sarbanes Oxley.
Today, perhaps only 15 or 20 percent of
applications being run on virtual infrastructures
are production systems; the majority of
organisations are using the technology only for
test environments. But analysts believe that the
number of production applications will grow to
between 45 and 60 per cent of total deployments
over the next two years as cost pressures bite.
In the headlong rush to gain cost benefits
there is a very real risk that companies are
moving into virtualisation far ahead of their
ability to understand and manage the technology.
The benefits are compelling. But at what cost to
business risk and security
Virtualisation adds huge complexity to the
IT infrastructure stack, pulling together large
numbers of applications and services into one
consolidated data centre. Traditional, silobased
management tools provide no insight
into operational performance of virtual systems,
leaving an organisation completely blind to the
impact of change, both planned and unplanned,
on the overall infrastructure.
Without a view into this virtual environment,
how can any organisation ensure machines are
tested and configured correctly or impose the
required level of rigour over system changes
To many of us, an energy shortage, similar to
global warning, seems to be something of a
abstract concept at the moment - it is hard
to conceive of a time when the UK will have to
ration its energy consumption. At worse, we can
console ourselves with the knowledge that such
a situation is years from coming to a head.
It seems however that the Inconvenient Truth
as popularised by Al Gore’s film concerning
power usage is making itself felt today.
John Windebank, itSMF UK’s International
representative comments. “If you’re a data
centre in London, you can’t buy any more power
because it’s not available. Power is becoming the
biggest cost to IT, exacerbated by carbon taxes,
and this is a problem that we must all face.”
Whatever your politics, or whether you
believe IT should take more responsibility for
the environment, the facts will ensure that the
green issue is a pertinent one for IT, becoming
perhaps the biggest threat to the current use of
IT we have ever faced.
Part of the problem, according to John, is
gross inefficiency, with data centres running
at between 10 - 12 per cent of their potential.
This leads to an obvious solution: if you can use
this latent 90 per cent of processing power to
run other tasks, you can reduce your energy
consumption dramatically. This is how the
concept of virtualisation was created and it is a
hot topic, with industry analyst group Gartner
calling it the biggest ‘impact trend’ for the IT
infrastructure up to 2012. Virtualisation of
servers - the main point of attack in terms of
reducing energy consumption - is already having
an effect, with Gartner stating that the market for
selling new servers fell by four per cent in 2006.
Moving on, Gartner also predicts that four million
machines will be installed on servers by 2009, so
the sale of new servers is sure to fall further still.
“Virtualisation is hardly a new concept;
storage has already been virtualised - albeit
primarily within the scope of individual
vendor architectures - and networking is also
virtualised,” said Philip Dawson, vice president
at Gartner. “However, as both server and PC
virtualisation become more pervasive, traditional
IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged
and is changing the way business works with IT.”
As hinted by Philip, it is not just servers that
are subject to the virtualisation push, with PCs
increasingly becoming virtualised. In 2007,
Gartner estimated five million virtualised PCs
and predicts 660 million by 2011. This huge
shift will see PCs becoming more like the dumb
terminals of old, with business applications and
even the operating system being offered to users
over a virtual network.
Thomas Bittman, lead analyst at Gartner,
details what the shift could mean for the IT
infrastructure. “Traditionally the operating
system has been the centre of gravity for client
and server computing, but new technologies,
new modes of computing, and infrastructure
virtualisation and automation are changing the
architecture and role of the operating system.
The days of the monolithic, general-purpose
operating system will soon be over.”
This is good news for IT service management
because in theory at least, managing a virtual
IT infrastructure eliminates many of the localised,
user created IT support issues which plague
the service desk, and make it much easier to
manage change and upgrades etc.
So, when you combine the expected benefits
of a virtual infrastructure with the huge, and
vital, cuts to energy usage, the time seems to
be right for virtualisation. As always, such a
push requires thorough research and planning
and on the next page, we look at some of the
issues that must be considered.
30 SERVICETALK july 2008