By George Teixeira, CEO & President, DataCore Software
The transition to a virtualized infrastructure environment has moved to the forefront of many IT discussions. Organizations of all sizes are continuing to pursue the benefits that virtualization can offer, from increased efficiencies to maximization of resources to lower costs. But virtualization is not just about servers or desktops.
Virtualization is about creating agile, cost-effective and enduring IT infrastructures that can evolve to support the enterprise over time. To date, virtualization has largely failed to live up to this promise. Many server and desktop virtualization projects have stalled or failed because of cost overruns or unanticipated infrastructure issues. But why is this happening?
What is being missed is that server and desktop virtualization are about more than merely virtualizing servers and desktops. They are both about virtual IT infrastructure—and if organizations do not virtualize the entire infrastructure, they will not achieve the anticipated return on investment (ROI) and business benefits they are seeking. What they often overlook is the part of the infrastructure upon which both virtual servers and desktops depend: storage.
Today, the “Big Problem” in virtualization projects is storage, and enterprises have learned some hard lessons. They are being sold forklift upgrades of their storage infrastructure and vendor-specific virtualization strategies to support virtualized server and desktop infrastructures. This has moved the storage issue—its high cost, inadequate performance, inflexibility and vendor lock-in—to the front burner in virtualization discussions. That’s why this has become IT’s next “Big Problem.”
Why Virtualize?
Why not? It is universally agreed that server virtualization is a huge leap forward…
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http://www.datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4499:solving-the-data-centers-next-big-problem&catid=28&Itemid=100123
