Virtualization Delivers a Dynamic Infrastructure

Learn how IBM can bring together all the appropriate consulting, expertise, hardware and software solutions organizations need to ensure that virtualization is leveraged in the ways that make best business sense.

By Internet.com Staff

November 5, 2009

fact sheet

Vendor: IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com)
About IBM Virtualization Solutions

About IBM Corporation

An increasing number of enterprises are turning to a dynamic infrastructure, which is designed to be service-oriented and focused on supporting and enabling end users in a highly responsive way. The transformation can't happen overnight, but a number of technologies can come together to make it possible.

In almost every case, the transformation to a dynamic infrastructure will involve virtualization. Many IT professionals think of virtualization specifically in terms of servers. IBM has a broader perspective, in which virtualization is seen as a general approach to decouple logical resources from physical elements, so those resources can be allocated faster, more cost effectively, and more dynamically—wherever the business requires them in real time to ideally meet changing demand levels or business requirements.

Virtualization helps to make the infrastructure dynamic. By moving to virtualized solutions, an organization can expect substantial benefits for both IT and the business.

On the IT side, costs will fall; this commonly occurs via enhanced resource utilization, recaptured floor space in data centers, and improved energy efficiency. Service levels will climb; the performance and scalability of existing services will both be boosted, and new services can be developed and rolled out much more quickly. Risks, too, will be mitigated, because the uptime and availability of mission-critical and revenue-generating systems, applications, and services will generally improve with virtualization.

On the business side, virtualization can create a foundation for growth. When new strategies are suggested by changing market conditions, they will be easier to create and deploy via a virtualized, dynamic infrastructure. Actionable business intelligence is acquired faster through real-time processing, helping to quantify the extent of any given strategy's success (or failure). With the appropriate management operations and systems control are consolidated, spurring time-to-solution, and should there be redundancy within the infrastructure or staffing, it is more easily identified and resolved as a result. Finally, employee productivity will typically climb with the improved management infrastructure.

Virtual servers are the best-known example of virtual solutions. They translate into many powerful business benefits, including reduced server sprawl through consolidation, reduced energy consumption, dramatically higher hardware utilization, greater flexibility in assigning processing power to IT services when they require it, and higher service availability.

IBM recognizes, however, that virtualization as a key element of the dynamic infrastructure can and should involve many other virtualized elements in addition to servers; in fact, best results will often come as additional areas of the infrastructure are virtualized.)

Virtual storage allows the organization to approach storage not as a fixed element tied to specific hardware, but as a fluid resource that can be allocated to any application or service that requires it, in real time. Databases in which new records are continually being created can grow in proportion to the business need without regard for the size of the hard drives on the systems hosting them. Data can be moved seamlessly to and from various tiers of storage to better align data's value with its cost.

When applications, systems, and services continually have access to the storage they require, overall IT availability, productivity, and service levels will climb, helping to maximize the return on investment of all the elements that use storage. Virtual storage also enables centralized management of storage resources from a single point of control, reducing management costs.

Virtual clients can directly address the problem of desktop sprawl. Desktops with a complete operating system and application stack translate into a substantial and expensive burden on IT teams. In particular, mass rollouts such as new applications or operating system versions can require months to finish, creating a substantial business impact.

Virtual ("thin") clients represent an attractive alternative. Thin clients are essentially identical from unit to unit; end user data and applications are migrated to shared servers and then accessed by users over the network using the thin clients. End user resources can be centrally managed by IT in an elegant, accelerated fashion, substantially reducing both desktop sprawl and all of its associated costs.

A virtual application infrastructure can also deliver powerful benefits. Imagine an organization in which many key services are supported by core Java applications operating on server clusters. Now imagine that an unexpected spike in demand requires higher performance from one of those applications, while the others remain comparatively idle. By virtualizing the application infrastructure, application workloads can be dynamically assigned across clusters, ensuring that such spikes are quickly and effectively addressed via more processing power whenever and wherever it's required.

Virtual networks can also play a major role in helping an infrastructure to become more dynamic. A single physical network node can be virtualized into several virtual nodes in order to increase network capacity. Multiple physical switches can be logically consolidated into one virtual switch in order to reduce complexity and ease management costs. Virtual private networks deliver similar security and performance to remote users as private physical networks would, yet at a far lower cost. Even network adapters can be virtualized, helping to decrease the number of physical assets in play throughout the infrastructure.

How IBM Can Help
IBM can bring together all the appropriate consulting, expertise, hardware and software solutions that organizations need to ensure that virtualization is leveraged in the ways that make best business sense for them. No single path or combination of technologies is likely to yield an ideal outcome for any two organizations. In every case, the process to a dynamic infrastructure will mean striving to achieve a tailored fit, implemented in a way that minimizes business impact and maximizes return on investment. Getting that tailored fit means selecting the right partner, and no competitor offers the breadth and depth of virtualization expertise that IBM does.

IBM, as a company specializing in virtualization, extends across more than 40 years and thousands of customer engagements around the world; as a result, IBM is better positioned than any other solution provider to advise organizations on what a dynamic infrastructure can help them achieve, and how best to go about achieving it.

IBM also offers the industry's broadest set of virtualization capabilities, from specific infrastructure and management offerings to complete virtualization solutions for single servers and multi-system environments. IBM has design and implementation networking solutions to support a highly available and virtualized environment and the ability to manage both physical and virtual server and storage environments in single- and multi-vendor environments.

IBM provides flexibility and choice of delivery models, including even the most advanced, next-generation strategies and architectures, such as cloud computing, to deliver on the full promise of virtualization through exceptional scalability, flexibility, responsiveness, and cost-efficiency. In short, IBM can help today's organizations create a more dynamic infrastructure through virtualization—reducing costs, increasing service levels, and managing risks for a better business outcome.