HP Insight Dynamics - VSE Business white paper

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Accelerate speed of change.
Unifying management of virtual and physical resources
Virtualized environments can easily become silos that
require their own tools, skills sets, and processes. This
is often the case. Many virtualized data centers have
one team to manage virtual machines and another to
manage physical servers. Each team has its own pro-
cesses and many organizations employ more than
one type of virtualization technology.
That kind of duplication is costly. It drains staff produc-
tivity, drives up training costs, and forces your company
to buy, use, and manage different sets of management
software. In a better world, physical servers and virtual
machines would be managed together—in the same
way, by the same people, using the same tools, under
the same processes.
Simplifying consolidation
When it comes to server consolidation, data centers
are caught in a paradox: They find themselves using
a complex, time-consuming process in an attempt
to reduce complexity and lower cost. In a study by
Forrester, nearly 75 percent of respondents reported
that their consolidation projects took more than one
year, and in some cases several years, to complete.
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Extensive planning, manual work, and the involvement
of many different parts of the organization make con-
solidation a laborious task.
To achieve a greater range of benefits from consoli-
dation, your organization needs tools that allow you
to transform project-based consolidation into a routine
initiative to rebalance and tune the infrastructure to
generate ongoing incremental benefits. In particular,
you need tools that provide real-time information on
server workloads, available capacity, and opportu-
nities to shift workloads among physical servers and
virtual machines.
Automating infrastructure provisioning
For IT teams, infrastructure provisioning can be both
time-consuming and resource-draining. Each time a
business unit, application owner, or development team
requests resources, a lengthy process begins. IT experts
have to capture system requirements, design the solu-
tion from scratch, and then identify the resources that
are currently available and those that need to be
procured. After that, an often-lengthy management
approval process begins. All the while, the people
who need to put the infrastructure to work are locked
into a waiting game.
To avoid this cumbersome, time-consuming system,
your organization needs software tools that help you
standardize, automate, and accelerate processes for
provisioning and repurposing infrastructure. Among
other capabilities, these tools should enable your IT
architects to create templates with specific, approved
configurations and then reuse those templates over
and over.
Deliver higher quality of service.
Extending high availability to more applications
High availability usually means resource-intensive clus-
tering solutions, which aren’t appropriate for all appli-
cations. Yet the success of your organization probably
depends on the availability of many applications, both
large and small. To keep your business operating
at its peak and enhance the quality of services you
deliver, you need ways to extend high availability
f eatures, along with fast recovery capabilities, to the
full breadth of your applications.
Extending the benefits of virtualization to your entire
infrastructure
For most organizations, the suggestion to “virtualize
everything” is not a viable option. Many workloads
are not suitable for deployment in virtual machines.
According to a leading analyst firm, by the end of
the decade, only half of all server workloads will
be virtualized.
Applications that run on physical servers can be time-
consuming and resource-intensive to deploy, manage,
and recover. When you need to make changes in the
physical servers, chances are you are going to have
to involve multiple organizations. That invariably takes
time and drives up costs. What’s needed is a way to
extend the freedom and efficiency of virtualization to
physical servers, as well as virtual machines.
Increase energy efficiency.
Consolidating power-hungry servers
In data centers around the world, energy costs are
rising rapidly and consuming an ever-greater portion
of technology budgets. Data center electricity use
has more than doubled since 2000, according to a
research report.
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The same study found that the total
electric bill for operating data center servers and
associated infrastructure was about $2.7 billion in the
United States and $7.2 billion in the world. And all the
while, the cost of energy has been spiraling upward.
2
Forrester Research, Inc.: “How Large Enterprises Approach IT Infrastructure
Consolidation” December 2007
3
“Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers In the U.S. and the World,”
Jonathan G. Koomey, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and Consulting Professor, Stanford University, February 15, 2007.
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