IT Strategy

Role of Virtualization in IT Strategy

May 23, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant

VMware CTO Steve Herrod in the article on eWeek.com titled Why Virtualization Is Becoming Strategic says that most organizations originally set out to utilize virtualization technologies in their IT systems to consolidate servers and save power draw, virtualization almost invariably becomes a strategic asset for the organization. It’s interesting to note how tactical solutions can lead to strategic directions. In this case, virtualization technology was proposed as a tactical solution to consolidate servers and save power – steps to cut cost.

To take this to the next phase of adoption, the user takes these virtualized machines and treat them as a cluster of resources according to Herrod and he goes on to say “It’s like the sum being better than each of the parts individually by allowing you to transparently failover between machines if one should go down, and to do load-balancing during the course of the day as the workload changes”. Focused on reducing IT infrastructure cost is what drove IT department to implement virtualization. That implementation has enabled the executives to view IT differently. Instead of getting intimidated by servers, load balancers, network routers etc, non technical executives can comfortably view IT Infrastructure as ‘resource’ cloud. Virtualization has thus created a layer of abstraction. Once the executives see IT infrastructure as a ‘resource’, they can now allocate that resource for maximum utilization. This in turn can enable the executives to look at IT as not just a cost center but as a resource center that can be deployed for maximize Return on Investment (ROI).

Thus knowingly or unknowingly, virtualization has enabled the executives to look at IT strategically.

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