Virtualization is often cited as a panacea for IT management, power consumption, and hardware budget headaches. But what can virtualization really do for your business? Nick van der Zweep of HP Insight Software digs into the details to unearth the real value proposition.
Virtualization is steadily finding a place within small and midsize companies, but it's still mysterious to some. For example, did you know virtualization has environmental benefits? Yes, going virtual means going green!
Nick van der Zweep, the director of virtualization and product management for HP Insight Software, explains what virtualization is, what sort of benefits -- including ROI -- smaller businesses can get from virtualization, and even the potential downsides.
bMighty: What is your virtualization specialty?
Nick van der Zweep: My role at HP definitely has me covering the four areas of virtualization: hardware, network, storage, and applications. I try to knit those all together. My secondary job is product management director, so the software manages the virtual environment, primarily servers.
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bMighty: What are the most important kinds of virtualization?
van der Zweep: There are different pieces of the puzzle, for sure. A lot of things have been happening in the enterprise and now small and midsize businesses -- what we did is take a step back a number of years ago and started focusing on adaptive infrastructure, focusing on shared resources, in order to drive down costs. That was focused on enterprise, but now things are simplified, and they're more appealing to small and midsize businesses. We see virtualization showing up in small and midsize businesses with storage, server, and network virtualization.
bMighty: Is there a return on investment for virtualization?
van der Zweep: There is a software cost, but now vendors are evolving, especially in the storage and server virtualization space. The types of things people are looking for are: How do I reduce my energy consumption? How can I make better use of the current capacity that I have? The average utilization for resources is 5%, 10%, maybe 15%. You've got excess infrastructure if you look at it that way.
People are also looking for better service levels. For example, IDC is expecting 52% less infrastructure costs by driving up utilization costs of its servers, storage, and such.
bMighty: How can small and midsize businesses get the most advantage from virtualization?
van der Zweep: What I'm seeing from an adoption-rate perspective is storage: In the past, every server had storage attached to it. And when you ran out of storage you had to buy disk drives to expand it -- even though storage across the company was very low. But you have one application that took it all up. By using storage virtualization capabilities, you reduce excess, and you get 40% better user capacity. You also get people benefits because backup is a lot easier -- you're backing up shared storage instead of individual chunks. And replication is easier.
Once you have a shared storage network, you can move a virtual machine from a physical server to another physical server. If the server is running at 100% utilization and the other is running at 10, VMware has technology called VMotion that lets you move virtual machines around. LeftHand Networks facilitates small and midsize businesses to cost-effectively take advantage of this migration technology. Storage is certainly more facilitating, and networking is changing to facilitate this as well.
The management software on the server itself manages the environment that could be physical and virtual. Today, a small or midsize business has an x amount of servers that it has to manage. You throw in virtual machines and servers, and now you have to manage physical machines and virtual machines. Enterprises could handle this, but in a small or midsize business the same person had to do everything. Small and midsize businesses didn't like adding new sets of tools that their people had to manage. So HP Insight Software has management software like Systems Insight Manager that comes with ProLiant servers, Integrity servers, and blade servers. It understands virtual and physical machines. The underlying technology could be VMware, Citrix, etc., but the end management system masks that for the customer so that it can manage physical and virtual machines.
We think small and midsize businesses don't want to create new jobs and roles -- they want things simplified.
We've seen a dramatic rise in blade systems. Enterprises are buying C7000 blade enclosures. For small and midsize businesses we have an eight-blade system more tailored to them. Each blade has virtual and physical machines, driving up utilization rates and bringing down energy rates.
Next Page: The Downside Of Virtualization
