Companies that fail to see their expected return on investment from virtualisation may be experiencing "virtualisation stall".
So says Warren Olivier, territory manager at Veeam, a virtual infrastructure management and data protection company.
According to Olivier, virtualisation stall is a very common problem in companies that are a couple of years into their planned virtualisation paths.
He explains that these companies usually get to about 40%, then hesitate to take the next step in virtualising business-critical infrastructure because of reliability, cost and data recovery concerns.
"It's a horrible position for a CIO to be in," Olivier notes. "On the one hand, your virtualisation business case was based on achieving 100% within a certain time limit, but on the other hand, you can't justify moving ahead unless you are completely sure you aren't exposing the organisation to risk."
IT services company CA Technologies says in a white paper that the potential benefits of virtualisation are well documented - increased agility, improved disaster recovery capability, and significant cost savings due to server consolidation.
However, it notes that many companies experience political and cultural barriers after virtualising 15% to 30% of IT processes.
"It is relatively easy to justify using virtualisation on low-priority systems and in the development arena, where ROI and agility gains are high and risk is low," says CA Technologies.
"The results for most organisations are very positive: significant cost savings and dramatically improved agility. However, despite considerable early success, many organisations find themselves at crossroads where the next step is unclear," it adds.
According to the white paper, IT leaders often cite security, compliance and visibility as their primary concerns.
Olivier believes one of the main obstacles is the reliability of backups. "Most virtual machine backup solutions are still based on technology developed for physical machines. They're slow, very difficult to test and not always reliable. If you can't be 100% confident that your backups will work to restore lost applications and data, it makes sense to hang back and wait."
CA Technologies also points out that, although the hesitation to further virtualisation is understandable, it is also costly. The lost opportunities and real costs due to virtualisation stall are substantial, it adds.
"For example, partial virtualisation creates organisational difficulties in the data centre that introduce additional complexity to the structure of IT departments. Having just some systems virtualised requires a silo of virtualisation-trained administrators as well as the normal regiment of administrators on the physical side."
In order to break the virtualisation stall barrier, CA Technologies says companies need increased visibility into their virtualised applications and hardware to identify and respond to any problems before they occur, thus minimising risk.
It adds that organisations also need efficient management tooling, explaining that point tools are simply not sufficient when managing virtualised mission-critical applications.
Businesses also need skilled virtualisation resources - companies should leverage services that increase virtualisation expertise for their staff, it concludes.
Share