The market transition to virtualisation has developed an opportunity to create a more agile and efficient infrastructure for resources within the data centre.
Companies have turned to virtualisation technologies for servers and data centres to simplify administration and reduce management chores and operating costs while maintaining reliability and safeguarding against disasters.
B.S. Nagarajan, Senior Technology Consultant, VMware India, says that a key benefit of virtualisation technology is the ability to contain and consolidate the number of servers in a data centre. This allows businesses to run multiple applications and workload manager on the same server.
Taking this forward, the VMware recently announced VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming data centres into simplified cloud infrastructure. It allows flexible, reliable IT services to be delivered both within internal clouds as well as from external clouds.
Mr. Nagarajan says that the VMware vSphere 4 aggregates and holistically manages large pools of infrastructure processors, storage and networking as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment.
For enterprise IT organisations, VMware vSphere 4 brings the power of cloud computing to the enterprise data centre, immediately slashing IT costs, while strategically positioning to be the IT service provider of the future. For hosting service providers, the VMware vSphere 4 provides a more economic and efficient path to becoming a cloud service provider that is compatible with customer’s internal data centres.
Sumit Mukhija, National Sales Manager (Data Centre), Cisco India & SAARC, said based on the Cisco’s understanding of this evolution, it recently launched the Unified Computing System (UCS), a newly designed data centre platform. It computes the network and increases the storage access.
The Cisco expects that this ability will extend to communications resources in future, whereby it would provide the ability to do away with the ubiquitous desk telephone and simply have an application on the PC that handles all the tasks of the telephone.
The UCS reduces the infrastructure needed in today’s systems by over 30 per cent, simplifying operations, reducing power and cooling costs. It also increases departmental productivity so that adding additional capacity or replacing failed systems can be done in minutes, not days.
Other companies, including HP, IBM and Microsoft, are also targeting a share of the market and industry reports predict that revenue associated with the managed services market will grow from nearly $30 billion in 2008 to nearly $43 billion in 2013.
