VIRTUAL DATA CENTER – A BOON TO IT INDUSTRY

Data Center Virtualization has emerged as a rare opportunity for IT industry. It provides substantial cost savings along with efficient sharing of network resources, physical servers that translates into more responsive and competitive business process.

The Challenges

In majority of companies, IT is referred as a cost center. As without the required support from IT, it is difficult to generate profits and revenues. However, IT drives revenue, but managing its business operations is still a costly affair. IT managers find themselves under constant pressure to do more with less. Major challenges they face include:

• Low Utilization - In traditional physical servers, it has observed that there is considerably low utilization of applications, often as low as 5 to 10%. In order to support tremendous growth of applications along with their supporting infrastructure, there is a need to optimize physical resources, servers, storage and networks.
• Complex operations - Application–centric Data Center Storage Solutions can lead to silos of infrastructure. These kinds of resources become incompetent, prevent resource sharing, and add complexity to the entire business process.
• Lack of agility - Every new enterprise application takes considerable time to install, configure, debug, patch and come to a working condition. Meanwhile today is era of smart phones wherein users have access to applications, installing and downloading new applications is just a matter of minutes. With the advancement of these new delivery models, provisioning applications has comparatively become simple and less time consuming. To keep pace with the increasing competition, developing and delivering applications more effectively than in the past is another IT challenge.
• Fiscal impact - In the age of return on investment, IT that is referred as main cost center of the company is expected to provide an immediate return on their investments. Keeping the current scenario of low utilization of existing systems in mind, now organizations are making a move towards data center virtualization to experience positive CAPEX returns along with improved OPEX. 

The Resolution:

Data Center Virtualization happens to be the solution of all the above-mentioned challenges. It can provide many valuable benefits to the organizations including significant savings on floor space, power consumption and cooling costs, as well as better utilization of existing resources across storage, servers and networks. However, financial benefits alone are convincing, more gains can be obtained as it reduces the complexity in business operations and streamlines the speed to provide agility to the IT business.