27 May 2009
More than half (55 per cent) of firms deploying virtual networking infrastructure have yet to see significant operational cost or resource savings, or a return on investment, according to research.
The survey by vendor Network Instruments (NI) also revealed that 55 per cent of global organisations run mission-critical virtual email and web servers, while half run virtual DNS and DHCP servers.
"Many of the people we're speaking with have implemented virtualisation, but often lack of visibility is keeping them from realising the benefits of the technology," said Ian Cummins, NI Europe vice president.
The survey also highlighted key concerns for IT staff, with 59 per cent believing they are not experienced enough to manage the technology, while 26 per cent said lack of virtualisation-related training was affecting success.
Securing virtual networks was causing great concern to 21 per cent of respondents, while 47 per cent judged the rollout costs of the technology too high.
The survey polled 120 network engineers, IT managers and executives attending Interop 2009 last week in Las Vegas.
Virtualization enables operational benefits, whether it is application virtualization or hardware virtualization. While virtualization lead to savings on the one hand it imposes new challenges. With regard to monitoring and management, while this is supported well at infrastructure level, it is not at the application level. Specifically, managing application service levels and isolating problems may be much more complex than in non-virtualized environments. For example, monitoring systems are not built for on-demand virtualized environments, which leads to high administrative costs. At the application level flexible monitoring tools supporting transactional tracing and relation of application performance metrics to those of the underlying virtualized environments are crucial.
Posted by: Alois Reitbauer, Technology Strategist at dynaTrace, blog.dynatrace.com 03 Jun 2009
I'm in an organisation that has been making use of virtualisation for about four years now and you don't even need O level economics to see the operational and cost benefits. Creating development environments, patching, migration, server provisioning and service resilience are benefits that scrape the surface, there's so much more I could almost write a dissertation on it!
I'd love to know more about why these IT managers don't see the benefits.
Posted by: David McAdam 29 May 2009
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