Liquid Computing
You've probably heard the word “virtualization” tossed around a lot lately among your staff and your peers. Maybe you were intrigued, but more likely you were skeptical. After all, in your tenure as an IT exec, you've seen dozens of technologies touted as the Next Big Thing.
But virtualization just may be different. It is actually paying dividends now. Saving real money for real companies, while simultaneously making them more efficient.
We recently commissioned IDC, the premier market intelligence firm, to explore the current state of the server virtualization landscape. Liquid Computing for a Dynamic Data Center, an exhaustive 12-page white paper, is the result. Their analysts offer an overview of virtualization now (Virtualization 1.0) and make predictions about what Virtualization 2.0 will look like—and how you can leverage it. They also identify the challenges inherent in adoption, the opportunities that can be seized, and the ways in which BEA's offerings can help you join the ranks of the virtualized.
Recent figures show that more than a third of medium companies have already virtualized their operations, and that figure jumps to more two-thirds when we look at large companies. Virtualized computing will be the rule, not the exception, within a decade. When you look at the myriad benefits it offers, the rush to virtualization is really no surprise. The signature of virtualization is doing more with less, which is precisely what all IT organizations are tasked with doing these days.
In a typical server installation, machines are running at 10 percent to 15 percent of capacity in order to allow sufficient headroom to take on additional load. But a virtualized server environment allows you to pack the work in tighter; fewer machines are running more applications, allowing you to take idle machines offline or deploy them elsewhere. It's not uncommon to increase that 10 to 15 percent utilization to 75 or 80 percent.
The obvious win is that you need less hardware to do the same amount of work. But there are many other associated benefits: with fewer hardware appliances, your data center requires less space, less staff, less power, and less cooling. (Cooling might not be at the top of your priority list, but it should be: New multicore processors produce incredible amounts of heat and data center cooling requirements have increased by an order of magnitude over the last decade.)
But there are myriad benefits beyond the obvious bottom-line savings. Advanced virtualization capabilities like those BEA offers through our WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and associated products can help your IT organization be more flexible and respond more quickly to business demands. These are the benefits of “Virtualization 2.0.”
BEA WebLogic Liquid Operations Control is the management console for all of our virtualization offerings, and it handles both automated server management and dynamic provisioning of resources. Liquid Operations Control moves work from one machine to the next to the next as needed, balancing load and optimizing resource utilization. It also allows your team to create and deploy servers within minutes, with the click of a mouse.
Contrast this with the traditional means of provisioning a hardware server: Your team is notified of the need for a new server, who requisitions the hardware and provisions and deploys the box. I've had major enterprise clients tell me that requisitioning and deploying a hardware server within their organization can take up to seven months. But a virtualized server can, quite literally, be created and deployed in 20 minutes or less.
Not only can you respond more quickly, but your IT organization is more agile. Going back to our hardware example for a moment, what if the hardware server that was requested months ago can no longer handle the work for which it was originally intended? You begin the grueling procurement and deployment process from scratch. Not so with the virtualized server: In minutes, you can provide additional servers to handle the new demand.
Will virtualization solve all your business challenges? Of course not. There are things virtualization can't do, and there are challenges to selling the virtualization vision throughout your organization. The Liquid Computing white paper addresses these challenges as well as the opportunities to be gained by those companies that get ahead of the curve on virtualization technology. I sincerely hope you download and spend some time with the white paper, as it collects all the salient information about the current state of virtualization, where it's headed, and how you can get there.
Cheers!
Alfred Chuang
Chairman and CEO
BEA Systems
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