FEATURE VIRTUALISATION
Three Expert Views on Virtualisation The Way I See it... We asked three industry insiders to give us their opinions on the most important issues concerning virtualisation today.
Don’t Forget the Lifecycle Chris Gabriel, Director of Solutions and Marketing, Logicalis
“Virtualisation is a business necessity; helping tackle the challenges of data centre sprawl, energy consumption, faster provisioning of business IT services, and driving down support costs. But while individual virtualisation technologies have come of age, we have so far seen sparse attention paid to bringing a complete
lifecycle approach to owning and operating virtual architectures. It is evident from issues such as the disconnect between disparate virtual infrastructures and multiple support contracts with
differing SLAs, that the industry has focused on helping customers to consolidate, rather than provide lifecycle solutions and services that can increase operational effectiveness and realise increased business value. By looking at virtualisation as a single entity, as opposed to disparate technology platforms, organisations can better ensure
optimum performance and efficiency throughout the lifecycle of its virtualised infrastructure; consolidate multiple support contracts; improve business service levels; reduce hosting space and simplify overall management of the virtualised infrastructure, ultimately driving down costs.”
The Pitfalls to Avoid Efi Gatmor, CTO, Expand Networks
“It is commonly understood amongst enterprises today that virtualisation, whether server or desktop, can pack a punch when it comes to economic and environmental efficiency. What is less well known is the negative impact these projects can have on network performance and user experience. Without assuring these two things by preparing the WAN in advance of virtualisation, many find all their hard work driving efficiency comes to wnothing, and results only in poorer business productivity. As organisations struggle to meet global business challenges by consolidating and virtualising IT services and applications, they
create a proximity gap between the users and their resources as they move physically further apart from each other. This causes applications, files & services - all traditionally designed for travelling over the LAN, not the WAN - to suffer from many performance challenges. It’s not just larger distances that the packets have to contend with; the interactive nature of VDI protocols means far higher levels of congestion and latency and users find their networks plagued with jitter, packet loss, and restricted capacity. We’ve been supporting organisations in virtualisation projects for a number of years now. At the start of this tenure, optimisation
techniques were often an afterthought, used to rectify quickly the performance impact of virtualisation after the deployment. Today, optimisation technology is commonly accepted as a key enabler to making virtualisation projects a success from the outset. This trend has been accelerated by further WAN Optimisation innovations where the technology can now be integrated into the virtualised infrastructure as a virtual appliance, and home and mobile users can use a client to access data. Regardless of device or location, technology that combines acceleration, compression and QOS techniques is making the virtualised WAN experience feel like the LAN again.”
The Future is Virtual Stephen Bedford, Technical Director, niu Solutions
“Virtualisation has matured and the enterprise is looking to replicate its benefits beyond simply server consolidation. For example, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which delivers desktop computing functionality without the management
burden and cost of PC-based architecture, gained traction in 2010, but will mature and evolve as a hot trend for 2011. Hosted centrally, and delivered as a service, existing VDI deployments are beginning to realise proven benefits, ranging from big
reductions in the cost and management of PC-based architecture, improved business continuity and disaster recovery options, as well as efficiency and environmental credentials. The scalability and flexibility of a virtual desktop infrastructure enables organisations to easily evolve desktop applications and
core infrastructure to help keep pace with new technologies and changes to compliance regulations. End users benefit from a full and high-performance desktop experience. By implementing a hosted or standard virtual desktop infrastructure, IT resource can be shared, savings can be significant and management complexity drastically reduced.”
38 NETCOMMS Volume I, Issue 4 2011
www.netcommseurope.com
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