How Virtualization Will Save IT

Over the past dozen years, IT organizations have been fighting a losing battle against server sprawl — the essentially irresistible proliferation of commodity servers that are cheap and easy to deploy, but complex and costly to manage in substantial numbers. The cost of managing these distributed servers has grown from a small fraction of the IT budget to the dominant IT cost component, far exceeding the cost of the servers themselves! This growing cost, coupled with tightened IT budgets because of the recent worldwide financial downturn, increases the urgency to find an alternative methodology for IT resource management.

While facing these problems of growing resource management costs and shrinking budgets, IT groups are being asked to do more than ever before. New pressures have come from four major directions:

• Exploding volumes of data, information, and new applications. Digital data, both raw and processed, is being generated at a dramatically increasing rate. As our world becomes highly instrumented and interconnected, data is also coming from a growing number of distributed sources (including such diverse sources as supermarket checkout stations, Web-click tracking software, and highway traffic sensors). By the end of 2011, one estimate indicates that the worldwide amount of digital data will be doubling every 11 hours! Accompanying this sea of new data, highly valuable new applications continue to emerge, many of which were previously impractical. In a growing number of situations, the new applications are being used to control complex distributed systems, evolving our world toward the promise of a smarter planet. This broad expansion in the role of IT is driving a huge increase in the need for storage, network, and computing resources — all of which add to the IT resource management challenge.

• Growing requirements for business resilience and security. As IT has become a critical underpinning of most businesses and government agencies, even partial IT outages can have traumatic consequences. While this dependence on IT continues to increase, contemporary IT infrastructures are fraught with critical vulnerabilities. The threats to IT are grave and increasing. Some threats come from within the IT organization itself, whereas new threats arise from distant groups, including terrorists and agents of political cyberwar. The magnitude of this problem is reflected in the landslide of security and business resilience regulations that must be followed.

• New mandates to reduce energy consumption. Until recently, energy efficiency was a low priority on most IT requirements lists (generally a third-tier requirement). Now, it has risen to the top. In part, this is due to rises in both energy cost and energy demand. In some situations, the energy required for additional IT resources is simply unavailable from existing energy suppliers. Power and thermal issues have also begun to inhibit IT operations — the addition and configuration of hardware resources is no longer just a matter of fitting into the available space. It must also take into account complex power and cooling constraints. Additionally, IT providers face environmental compliance and governance requirements, including the growing societal pressure to be "green."

• The accelerating pace of technological innovations. Technological innovations are occurring at an increasing rate, and many of these innovations have compelling IT value. Examples include the rapidly improving virtualization technologies, converged networks, solid-state storage, IT appliances, storage de-duplication, the increasing numbers of cores and threads per chip, low-cost high-bandwidth fiber optics, petaflop supercomputers, cloud computing services, real-time data streams, cloud computing architectures, and distributed sensors/actuators (as used in transportation grids, power grids, and other real-time control systems). The best products available at any point will soon become the old, deficient products that lack many valuable functions and features. As a result, most IT infrastructures will consist of a diversity of product types and generations, rather than becoming homogeneous.

This book opens the door to solutions for all these problems. It explains how to plan and implement advances in virtualization technologies and management software to enable a vital breakthrough in IT effectiveness, efficiency, resiliency, and security.

This chapter explains the various types of technologies that fit under the rubric of virtualization, the advances in virtualization that have historically changed IT centers, and emerging technologies that continue to work major transformations in administrators' jobs and resources. You will also learn how emerging forms of cloud computing will leverage virtualization and the Web to play a valuable and expanding role in the implementation of the IT infrastructures of the future.

The Current IT Crisis

The strains in data centers large and small spring from a number of pressures that we'll explore in this section.

IT Infrastructures Have Become Too Labor-Intensive

Figure 1.1 illustrates a key problem faced by most IT providers. At the top of the figure is a depiction of the business processes whose implementation is the main purpose of IT. Unfortunately, the cost of managing the underlying IT resources has grown to the point where it consumes the lion's share of the IT budget, leaving limited funds to spend on business processes and applications.

Studies have shown that IT operational overhead has grown to account for 70 percent of the enterprise IT budget, leaving precious few resources for new initiatives. Much of this problem stems from the fact that physical configurations, unless well virtualized, have many hard constraints that are impediments to routine operational tasks such as the deployment of new applications or the adjustment of workload resource levels. The amount of resource provided per server is usually fixed when the server is deployed and rarely matches the actual needs of the assigned workload, which may vary dynamically. Industry-wide studies of Windows® and Linux® systems have indicated that their average server utilization is well below 10...