Cloud Computing and Virtualisation

Let’s start this article with a quick poll: How many times today did you see or hear the word “cloud” on the web sites you visit, in the technology literature that you read or in the sales presentations that you heard? I’m willing to bet that this word came up many, many different times, in many contexts and that, attached to it, were many promises.

It wasn’t all that long ago that we heard the same kind of hype for virtualization. No longer did IT organizations have to buy a separate server for every workload. Now, a single server can host a few, or even dozens or more, applications without breaking a sweat. After all, the model under which many IT departments operated was to push the traditional x86 computing model only so far. Servers were spec’d for peak loads but for much of their operating life they hummed along in the single to low double digit utilization percentages. Virtualization turned this idea on its head. With virtualization, many applications would share the resources of one or just a few servers and peak loads would be controlled by the hypervisor to ensure that all workloads remained available and operational.

So, was the physical server model “wrong” in any way? Not really. It was simply inefficient; with virtualization, the shared nature of the resources could bring down costs and, when architected properly, improve overall service availability. But, one thing remained constant: Although some organizations simply outsourced their data centers, most kept their virtual environments operating in their own internal data centers. The paradigm shift was internal and localized; it was tactical and operational in nature. Obviously, there have been massive benefits and virtualization itself has brought about a transformation for the way IT does business, but the overall business has remained basically unaffected. Internal IT operations shifted around and maybe costs came down a bit, but the company kept on doing business as usual.

Virtualization has also brought with it massive demand for new skill sets. While larger organizations have always had a need for skills such as deep storage management, Fibre Channel and the like, virtualization has pushed the need for these kinds of skill sets into smaller organizations that wish to reap the full benefit of the virtualization technology wave. Further, the need to learn about the hypervisor itself has become a major need with companies such as VMware establishing popular and sought after certifications to meet this demand. Virtualization and the need to be able to carefully monitor and manage these modern day environments has also created very successful new companies such as Veeam and VKernel and has launched to success many sites dedicate to the craft, including our very own virtualizationadmin.com.

Even with all of this success and the associated behind the scenes IT changes necessary to get virtual environments in place, we still have physical servers. Very few organizations are 100% virtualized. There are still many uses cases that call for physical servers. Sure, for most of these use cases, a virtual server could do the job, but the task is performed more efficiently with a more traditional approach.

CCTS can offer virtual solutions to suit your business needs