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By 2010, IDC projects that US$20 billion will be spent annually on server hardware supporting virtualisation. Why? Virtualisation can save money and deliver better IT services, often more quickly. Read about what virtualisation is and how other businesses are using it today.
Virtualisation has gone mainstream.
IDC predicts that by the end of 2007, more than 10 percent of all server computers will host virtual machines supporting more than 3.6 million virtual servers. That’s a 52 percent increase over 2006. By 2010, the analyst firm also projects, $20 billion will be spent annually on server hardware supporting virtualisation.(1)
Why are companies so eager to virtualise now? There are a number of factors at play, but they all boil down to this: Virtualisation can save money and deliver better IT services, often more quickly.
Watch Making Virtualization Real (video, 2:34)
It’s hard to argue with cheaper, better, faster. Even so, it can be difficult to introduce an idea as disruptive as virtualisation to an organisation accustomed to a traditional IT infrastructure. Smaller scale projects are a good way to get started.
How does virtualisation work?
Today, IT resources – such as servers and storage – are typically dedicated to one application. Each application needs enough computational power, storage and other resources to meet not just day-to-day needs, but peak loads. As a result, organisations typically allocate the maximum resources they project systems will need, sometimes adding even more for potential growth. As a result, servers and storage capacity is often greatly underutilised.
If an application (let’s say your customer relationship management system) isn’t used at maximum capacity 24 hours a day, then the processors and hard disks dedicated to that application sit idle most of the time. Your shipping database, meanwhile, might be staggering under an unusually heavy load, yet there’s no way for it to tap unused capacity dedicated to the CRM application.
With virtualisation, such excess capacity could be put to use where it’s needed most, when it’s needed most. Virtualisation is the pooling and sharing of resources to ensure that IT supply meets business demands. Virtualisation allows administrators to divide up resources as needed and to set rules that reallocate them when needed, based on business priorities. So, rather than dedicating an entire disk array to your e-mail application, for example, you might allocate 800 gigabytes of storage from a virtual pool.
Likewise, your e-mail server might run on one of several virtual servers, on a physical server, using slices of one chip’s processing time. Yet it still behaves as if it alone had access to the physical server’s resources.
In other words, virtualisation decouples individual business applications from dedicated hardware, allowing you to take maximum advantage of the total resources in the environment. You save money by buying fewer resources (cheaper), you can add new applications or change the ones already running much more quickly (faster), and the service levels can be improved because applications can get the resources they need when they need them (better).
Find out more about how companies are benefiting today.
(1) IDC Special Study, Worldwide Server Virtualization 2006-2010 Forecast, Doc #07C5089, January 2007
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