| Virtualisation - Key For The Data Centre |
| Thursday, 13 July 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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Virtualisation has long promised higher utilisation rates for storage, more effective distribution of network services and more efficient use of computing resources, and consequently reduced costs for those responsible for an IT infrastructure. While people have grown weary of the hype, two things have happened to give CIOs pause to revisit virtualisation technologies. First, the demand for storage capacity has skyrocketed; IDC estimate that the amount of data storage purchased by an enterprise is growing at a rate of 80% per year. Given that current storage utilisation rates are only around 30% of capacity, the promise virtualisation gives of expanding that beyond 80% has a significant implication for the bottom line of any business. Secondly: the technology has improved. Industry leaders have developed products which make it possible to achieve these efficiencies in hardware terms, and also manage them so that the cost benefits can genuinely be achieved. Virtualisation enables three main things: first, higher utilisation of storage capacity, second, simplified management and operation of resources and thirdly, the flexible and agile use of resources – for example, faster provisioning of services and reuse of resources as patterns of usage change. The consequence of these is that overall costs can be reduced and essential services can be delivered more rapidly. With technology now available that delivers these results in practise, as well as theory, virtualisation is coming of age – and is unquestionably the way forward. Read the full article here.
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