Virtualization Survey: How are companies measuring success?

Virtualization has proven to be a breakthrough in networking infrastructure. With its flexibility, adaptability, and reduced technology requirements, virtualization alleviates many problems associated with the traditional client-server environment, such as low resource utilization, management, and security issues.

Advisory and consulting firm Ovum released a virtualization study that showed three overarching themes to measuring the success of virtualization investments.

Cost
The tumultuous economy prompted many organizations to move virtualization to the top of their IT investment list, according to Ovum. Virtualizing servers can decrease server hardware purchases, facility, provisioning and migration costs.

Nearly 70 percent of enterprise organizations noted capital costs as a success metric. The survey pointed out that many respondents - 24 percent - were looking to reduce IT staff outright, hoping to shift IT staff responsibilities away from data center maintenance to new or core projects.

Forrester noted that organizations are saving up to 50 percent on hardware costs, depending on the consolidation ratio.

Understanding the virtual environment will go a long way toward capturing cost savings. For example, IT staff can eliminate guesswork and approach virtualization with greater confidence by getting empirical data on server and application resource utilization. This will help confirm that the applications selected for virtualization will meet cost-reduction objectives.

Productivity
About 40 percent of enterprise respondents listed productivity as one of the top three success factors from a list of potential benefits. This includes productivity improvements in IT staff.

Accurately predicting virtualized application performance before implementation can help organizations avoid costly and time-consuming provisioning errors. Productivity benefits can come from operational efficiencies in the data center as well. Operational efficiency includes these business benefits:

• Consistent IT service delivery
• Improved manageability
• Increased agility

Several performance management techniques help keep the data center operating smoothly:

• Correlating performance data to locate the IT component that is the root cause of a problem
• Drilling down from an anomalous point on a performance graph to determine who or what is responsible for a bottleneck
• Watching trends and cycles in system performance and projecting future performance levels as compared to service levels specified in the service definition
• Analyzing trends to determine how best to ensure service levels will be met in the future
• Identifying underutilized capacity for potential redeployment

New markets and business
Server virtualization is a strategic answer to consolidating under-utilized servers, reducing energy consumption, and trimming data center space requirements. It can also help companies become more responsive to business needs.

This flexibility and responsiveness can enable businesses to serve customers, partners and suppliers more effectively, according to Ovum. Their survey cites that 31 percent of enterprise respondents noted the ability to support new business requirements as a top success metric.

One challenge associated with helping the business with new markets and business is the ability to increase the flexibility of testing and conducting what-if experimentation.

For example, with the right IT Service Optimization tools, IT can pre-test software upgrades and identify potential performance variations before they affect service levels.

Also, the right tools can help IT determine optimal application/hardware configurations without changing any hardware and without delaying deployment schedules by predicting performance under scaled-up, production-level workloads.

Virtualization Survey Results
Request the "Optimized management key to success in virtualized environments" report from pr@teamquest.com.

The Ovum survey shows that organizations are quickly realizing that virtualization without proper planning, management and service optimization capabilities can lead to performance headaches that can stymie attempts to leverage the technology for real business advantage.