Globalization and technological innovation have led to the growth of IT infrastructures in every business environment. With such apparent infrastrucutre growth, the corporate houses as well as small and medium business enterprises are faced by the challenges of increased energy and power cost as well operational overheads. Organization in an attempt to meet these challenges has turned to use data centers. The extensive use of data centers today demands that these organizations reduce their carbon footprints and global warming.
Data centers which came into existence to meet the growing need for information storage and faster retrieval across the locations, were dense with computer systems, networking and telecommunication equipment. Further, with demands for a customized software and applications in all walks of the product life cycle, critical business data had to be made available to the IT outsourcing teams. This called the need for strong information security methods. Virtualization of the data centers were aimed towards making efficient use of available hardware and software resources. However, with the eco-friendly requirement integrated into the business systems, the IT giants worked on developing datacenter virtualization models which would help in reduction of energy consumption by nearly 80-90%.
With green computing becoming the buzz word today, organizations tend to use environmentally bio-degradable materials and sustainable resources rather than hazardous materials as components for the data center infrastructure. Further, data center virtualization allows organizations to reduce the number of hardware installed which brings in cost savings in sizable forms. However, adopting virtualization was easy without the requirement of any large investments.
The growing demands for datacenter virtualization paved way for leaders in the IT industry to extend their experience in IT operations and management to both small and medium business organizations as well as the as large corporate giants. These IT service providers offer the client organizations virtualization-as-a- service, besides the traditional virtualization methods across applications, networks and systems.
The data center virtualization offered by the leaders in the industry segment can be enumerated as a 5-phase lifecycle process. This includes -
* Assessment and analysis of the performance statistics of the existing infrastructure, applications, its related business requirement.
* Defining the requirements for environmental changes and bring about architectural changes through operational design
* Implementation and integration of virtual infrastructure with application and network
* Facility Management and
* Transformation
The client organizations benefits with facilities of virtualization without any upfront investment. Correct implementation of virtualization will establish valuable efficiencies like agility, flexibility, better network capacity besides reducing costs.
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