Consolidate and Optimize your IT Infrastructure

Organizations today face challenges that require a new approach to how IT is conceived and implemented. They need a dynamic infrastructure that reduces costs and generates more business value while managing risk to the companys information. Virtualization and cloud computing form an important part of this, unchaining logical resources from physical elements and redelivering them in a fluid fashion whenever and wherever the organization requires them. Many high-value business benefits follow: higher hardware utilization, higher uptime, lower energy costs, and faster IT response to business units. The initial benefits of virtualization especially cost reduction due to physical consolidation efforts are generally regarded as the one time benefits of an enterprise-wide virtualization effort, justified by a significant reduction in capital expenditures (CapEx). Reducing the number of physical servers by consolidating virtual servers results in more efficient and higher performing IT environments. Besides virtualization and cloud computing help in making IT infrastructure more environmentally friendly. Both run on the concept of on-demand scalability. Infrastructure scaling is available at your fingertips, ondemand. Increased computing power is available with increased load. After the high-traffic season the extra resources are released back. This brings about a drastic reduction in carbon overheads associated with idle, power hungry server farms running all year round. IT INFRASTRUCTURE CONSOLIDATION RECENT TRENDS Each year the addition of new applications and increases in processing power, networking and storage continue to accelerate. Demands on IT managers to provide reliable infrastructure continue to grow further. At the same time, regulatory compliance demands more and better data protection, and globalization has made readily available data an indispensable competitive tool. IT budgets havent kept up with increasing application or storage needs. Fewer resources have to support these growing demands compounded with limited data center resources such as floor space, cooling and power and the challenges can seem insurmountable. Fortunately, advances in technology, including virtualization and the more recent cloud computing, are helping address these issues. Companies of all sizes are employing virtualization technology as a way to reduce costs and improve services to deliver a more dynamic infrastructure. A scalable virtualization environment is important for more reasons than just near-term benefits to business operations and the bottom line. The IT services industry is moving toward new service delivery models including cloud computing. More and more organizations are pulling back servers and applications from remote branches to centrally house them in datacenters. THE MAIN DRIVERS FOR CONSOLIDATION The reasons to consolidate IT infrastructure are wide-ranging. Some of the key drivers are mentioned below: SIMPLIFY IT MANAGEMENT As server sprawl increases, IT organizations are forced to spend more time on basic administrative tasks supporting, maintaining, and troubleshooting distributed resources. This inhibits ITs ability to work on more proactive, strategic projects to improve infrastructure and service levels, deploy new applications, and align more closely with the business. With fewer locations to support, and servers to backup and manage, consolidation leads to an increase in productivity for IT operations. It also allows for the best use of the available staff resources. Accordingly, fewer people are needed to manage centrally-controlled servers resulting in lower operational expenses (OPEX) and improved staff productivity. COST REDUCTION With consolidation, IT organizations can reduce the number of a companys physical servers and related infrastructure overhead, resulting in a dramatic reduction in physical infrastructure costs. The cost of purchasing hardware as well as software licensing for servers previously located in remote sites is eliminated. In addition, organizations realize other cost savings in terms of floor space, power consumption, cooling, and maintenance. DATA PROTECTION AND SECURITY Consolidation addresses many of the issues surrounding data protection and archiving. Data consolidation eliminates the need for backup infrastructure in remote sites and minimizes the number of people who have

physical access to IT assets. As a result, companies can reduce the risk of data breaches and exposure to enhance their overall security posture. CONSOLIDATION AND SERVER VIRTUALIZATION Along with the IT consolidation trend, server virtualization has risen to the forefront of initiatives because of the multiple benefits it offers to IT in the form of:
Additional cost and power savings by eliminating server hardware Increased resource utilization Consistent test and production environments Hardware independence through the virtual abstraction layer Improved release times for new services Enhanced disaster recovery capability

Virtualization offers extensive opportunities for IT managers to fundamentally transform the operations in their datacenters. Traditionally, servers at data centers operate at 10 to 20 percent of CPU capacity and are dedicated for a specific workload to minimize incompatibilities and resource conflicts. Server virtualization technology allows a single physical server to be partitioned into several isolated virtual containers for running multiple applications at the same time. By leveraging many virtual servers, organizations can drive up server CPU resource utilization to eliminate idle capacity. This allows system administrators to consolidate greater workloads onto fewer servers, and provide substantial savings in space, power, and cooling. Apart from consolidating servers, virtualization also provides a solution to contain future server growth by deferring the need to purchase new physical servers. Server virtualization is especially useful when deploying new IT services and applications. By creating a consistent replica of development and production environments, IT organizations can complete testing of applications faster and speed up the release times of new services. In fact, the deployment of new servers is also reduced dramatically by virtualizing the environment. This enables IT organizations to respond more

rapidly to business demands for new applications and computing resources. In addition, the ability to snapshot servers, redeploy virtual machine images, along with hardware platform independence combines to deliver enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. In terms of DR, virtual machines can be recovered more rapidly than traditional physical server builds, further reducing downtime and associated costs to create a more resilient data infrastructure in the face of outages or failure events. Over a period of time, server virtualization and consolidation have evolved to a point where they have become almost synonymous with each other. Together, they simplify data centers while reducing costs and administrative overheads. BENEFITS OF SERVER VIRTUALIZATION Physical Machine Difficult to move or copy Bound to a specific set of hardware Often has a short lifecycle Difficult to manage remotely Requires hands-on upgrading of hardware Consumes significant resources Management challenges Virtual Machine Easy to move and copy, provision applications Independent of physical hardware, isolated from other virtual machines running on the same physical hardware Longer lifecycle, reduction in server costs Increased mobility, encapsulates data into files Insulated from physical hardware changes Reduction in energy and cooling costs Easy to manage, improved availability of applications

Virtual server infrastructures offer powerful features for deploying and managing hundreds or thousands of virtual machines easily and efficiently. Strategically, server virtualization is an IT modernization catalyst that will change the way IT is acquired, consumed, managed, sourced and paid for. Virtualization will change the way businesses innovate and grow. If done well, server virtualization makes fundamental changes that can lead organizations on the path of private and public cloud computing. Though, server virtualization is not the only path to cloud computing, cloud services will be offered at many levels of IT stack including applications (SaaS) and application infrastructure service (PaaS). Virtualization technology and private cloud computing models are helping organizations transform and deploy infrastructure solutions that simultaneously meet cost, service quality, and agility requirements. The evolution of virtualization into a private cloud solution also leads to significant improvements in agility and scalability. VIRTUALIZATION DRIVES MULTIPLE BENEFITS THAT VARY WITH THE STAGE OF ADOPTION

As shown in the figure above, IT organizations typically begin in the IT Production phase by virtualizing servers in domains controlled by IT to achieve significant capital and operating expense cost efficiencies. Then they expand their use of virtualization in the Business Production phase to include business application domains improving critical-business-system uptime and service levels and they put more systems under the domain of disaster recovery. Finally, as organizations deploy private cloud solutions that pool computing resources into a shared and agile infrastructure, they can deploy an IT-as-a-service model that allows IT to quickly respond to emerging business opportunities. THE MOVE TOWARDS CLOUD COMPUTING The cloud concept takes virtualization a step further by enabling users of IT resources to avoid investing in dedicated infrastructure. IT costs become a variable operational expense for business users because capacity is shared. Adopting this mode allows capacity to scale up and down dynamically and immediately in a manner that advances how virtualization is used today. The cloud model is designed to let companies use IT resources as a service, taking advantage of shared applications, processing and storage managed within the cloud either inside a private cloud at an internal data center, or in an external cloud at a service provider. Today Server virtualization is the major trend Virtualization initially driven by hardware consolidation and the resulting savings in CAPEX, power, space Business agility, disaster recovery and business continuity became additional drivers Virtualization solutions are established; cloud computing solutions are emerging Overall, the requirement for IT expertise is still significant for virtualization and internal clouds Management and monitoring capabilities are still developing - Ongoing IT administration is required - Policy making is not automated Vendors have not implemented virtualization and cloud computing standards Security, privacy and compliance issues still to be addressed for sensitive applications/services Most external cloud service level uptime agreements (SLAs) are below mission-critical levels Tomorrow Cloud computing is the major trend Driven by desire to benefit from IT resources provisioned as a service Pay-as-you-go, utility computing models allow business users to avoid fixed costs Highly elastic, instant access to computing resources and IT services Virtualization and cloud solutions become mature Simpler deployment, use will make benefits broadly achievable Management and monitoring come of age to reduce requirements for specialized IT expertise - Self-management - Automated policy-making Virtualization and cloud standards will increase ease of deployment, reduce risk Appropriate best practices for security, privacy and compliance will develop Enterprise users of utility computing will expect resilient cloud infrastructure and specify uptime as high as 99.999% for mission-critical applications and services There are three common types of clouds: private, public, and hybrid. A private cloud is based upon a pool of shared resources (whether mainframe, distributed, or virtualized), whose access is limited within organizational boundaries. The resources are accessed over a private and secured intranet, and are all owned and controlled by the organizations IT department. In essence, the cloud computing business model is brought and managed in-house to enable shared IT services. A public cloud is a domain where the public Internet is used to obtain cloud services. The resources that make up those services are owned by the respective cloud service providers. Some examples include Salesforce.com, Google App Engine and Google search, Microsoft Azure, and Amazons bevy of Web services.

A hybrid cloud is a combination of internal and external clouds, where services from each domain are consumed in an integrated fashion and include an extended relationship with the selected external service providers. Public cloud services like Amazon, Google, Salesforce, et al drive cost down and scale up by trying to support thousands, perhaps millions of businesses on their platforms. They centralize all of their services in a few data centers around the world, and try to deliver global services at acceptable performance from these locations. This is the purest vision of the cloud. It completely abstracts away all the complexity of dealing with physical IT infrastructure. Due to thin-provisioning and virtualization, these vendors can present a seemingly limitless data center infrastructure at a low monthly cost. Private cloud services take the fundamental business and delivery model for public vendors and scale it down to delivering the computing capacity for an individual enterprise. For enterprises that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees, they may also reach the tipping point where they can cost effectively provide the type of instant, seemingly endless computing and storage capacity that public vendors have. REASONS TO BUILD PRIVATE CLOUDS
Lower Capacity Pooling resources will let organizations reduce computing capacity by giving higher-

priority tasks power during peaks

Reduce Overhead x86 servers and related resources in a virtual data center can be managed as a unit Prepare A private cloud will help IT teams get ready for private-public hybrid clouds in the future data

center By consolidating storage and applications, virtualizing infrastructure, and then providing acceleration to branch offices and mobile workers, businesses are beginning to create private cloud services. In essence, businesses are taking their physical data centers and changing the way they manage the services that run out of that data center. In addition to overcoming issues of availability, security, and lock-in, organizations see one other benefit to the private cloud model: dealing with sunken data center costs. Over time, businesses that adopt a private cloud model may more easily transition to a hybrid model that uses both private and public cloud models. In fact, in a recent discussion with a top-10 engineering companies, the CTO looked at the public cloud as flex capacity to support their private cloud infrastructure. As large projects come online, shift locations, or undergo other transitions, public cloud services may supplement their internal capacity to ensure that IT services are not a bottleneck to completing a revenue-generating project on schedule.

At a fundamental level, the value proposition promised by cloud computing remains much the same as for virtualization: a means to reduce expenses and improved agility to meet changing business needs. CLOUD BURSTING Cloud bursting is the ability to leverage external cloud services on a short-term, as-needed basis. This is a way for an organization to extend its existing internal IT infrastructure or private cloud. For example, if you require additional compute capacity relatively quickly and for a short period of time, you could lease the required capacity from a cloud service provider and end your agreement when this need subsides. This would be typically useful around seasonal or event-based peaks of traffic that push the existing IT infrastructure over its capacity, but is not consistent enough to warrant additional hardware and software investment which would for the most part sit idle. The resources are acquired from the cloud service provider, secured, provisioned, and added to load balancers so that they then have the ability to take on the additional requests. This can happen on an approved, scheduled, or as-needed basis. MOVING TOWARDS GREEN IT Virtualization and consolidation are a step towards setting up a Green IT infrastructure.
Greening the IT infrastructure reduces power and cooling costs because the technology requires less

energy and are more efficient than older hardware platforms

Greening means more efficient management of data centers, which means more cost savings Green IT is composed of several technologies that all have the goal of reducing power consumption,

overall data center footprint, consolidating locations and resources, and improving efficiency of operations. Consolidation provides a more flexible and efficient platform that helps reduce power consumption. Implementing virtualization technologies helps with consolidating environments and also provides the flexibility to use only the power required to run those virtual machines. Instead of multiple single servers dedicated to a single function, multiple workloads can run on one machine. Once physical servers have been converted to virtual servers, the data center will see the benefits of more efficient processing. CONCLUSION Virtualization and infrastructure consolidation can offer significant benefits for both IT and business operations. The cost savings and administrative efficiencies are the main reasons why organizations are looking to consolidate and move to a virtual infrastructure en masse. Virtualization is the key. Most companies first step on the virtualization path is to consolidate their servers, using virtualization to run multiple applications on each server instead of just one, increasing the utilization rate of (and getting more value from) every server and, thus, dramatically reducing the number of servers they need to buy, rack, power, cool, and manage. Leveraging virtualization to better serve users gives the organization the obvious lower TCO, but also allows for accountability of usage, simplifies and meets the needs of on-demand infrastructure requests, and allows for ability to serve, control and manage SLAs. Virtualization has played and will continue to play a huge role in cloud computing. It is the technology that has allowed service providers to deliver lower-cost hosting environments to businesses of all sizes today. As the leader in virtualization, Netmagic Solutions recently launched its Cloud Computing services. With its proven, reliable platform, Netmagic Solutions is committed to working with enterprises who want to build private/internal clouds with the ability to coalesce to external providers to meet the changing needs of their business. Our virtual datacenter operating system enables private/internal clouds with features such as selfservice provisioning, chargeback, and many other advanced automation and management features. Read more about- Datacenter, cloud hosting services, Dedicated Hosting services