Data center virtualization and its economic implications for the companies

Abstract

In the current situation of the economic crisis, when companies target budgetcuttings in a context of an explosive data growth, the IT community must evaluate potentialtechnology developments not only on their technical advantages, but on their economiceffects as well. More then ever, the old cliché “doing more things with fewer resources” istrue today. Many IT companies started building very large facilities, called data centers(DCs) or Internet DC (IDCs), which provide businesses a wide range of solutions forsystems deployment and operation. In recent years, the IT departments around the worldhave moved from data center and infrastructure consolidation to virtualization.Data center virtualization is the process of aligning available resources with the actualneeds of the offered services, moving from physical servers to virtual servers, sharing andprovisioning servers, networks, storage, and applications. By taking advantage of threebasic innovations — virtualization, tiered storage architectures and dynamic provisioningsoftware — an organization can achieve greater efficiencies in their current computingenvironment.Such a unified computing architecture offers end-to-end virtualization; all structures areoptimized for virtualized environments, from the CPU to the aggregation layer. Incombination with embedded management, this new approach increases responsiveness andreduces the opportunities for human error, improving consistency and reducing server andnetwork deployment times