It`s no secret that today`s IT environments are driven by a completely different set of tenets to what they were 10 years ago.
Where in the late nineties, IT departments could have gotten away with healthy 10% to 15% annual budgetary increases that allowed their IT managers to procure new hardware, upgrade the company`s software and employ the staff required to manage that increasingly complex IT environment, today the exact opposite is true.
Business heads are demanding that their IT shops deliver increased efficiency, accuracy and competitive advantage to their line of business managers - and they`re giving their IT departments ever smaller budgets to do so with.
They are also throwing new challenges into the fray - since IT equipment accounts for a great deal of the business`s annual electricity consumption, CIOs have to be thinking greener. With electricity costs set to increase sharply, nearly every company is looking at ways of reducing its data centre`s power consumption.
So, while it`s become somewhat of a clich'e, it`s become clear that today`s IT departments have to deliver more with less.
And most seem to be looking towards consolidation as a way to do that.
Today`s CIOs are strongly focused on either making better use of their existing infrastructure or replacing it with less infrastructure, that`s capable of serving the business`s needs better - in IT speak, they`re virtualising their IT environments.
For those of you that aren`t keeping yourselves up to date with the latest IT terms, virtualisation is quite simply the ability to abstract physical resources such as servers, storage volumes and networking infrastructure from their logical representation inside an IT ecosystem.
That is to say, virtualisation offers businesses the ability to carve the sum total of their physical IT assets up into discrete, smaller `virtual machines` that can be deployed wherever the CIO sees fit.
It reduces computing hardware to nothing more than a pile of building blocks from which an extremely customised and individual IT environment can be built.
Essentially, this means that the business`s more demanding IT services can get the computing power they require, while their less demanding services aren`t housed on expensive, high-capacity infrastructure that could be better used elsewhere in the business.
In a manner of speaking, virtualisation fulfils on both of the CIO`s key consolidation goals - it allows them to make better use of the available resource in the data centre, while ensuring that at the same time, the physical volume of infrastructure in the data centre is reduced.
In this series of four columns, we`ll take a deeper look at what virtualisation is and what businesses should know about it, both in terms of the benefits it brings to the business and the potential pitfalls it can present.
And since virtualisation is something that most organisations will consider in the next 12 to 18 months, we trust you`ll find the information presented here valuable.
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