How to Address the Two Key Challenges with Virtualization

A Riverbed Technology White Paper How to Address the Two Key Challenges with Virtualization
How to Address the Two Key Challenges with Virtualization



© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 0 How to Address the Two Key Challenges with Virtualization
INTRODUCTION
The past two decades have seen a migration to a decentralized computing model with companies globally distributing their operations. As a result, the amount of data and IT assets stored outside of corporate data centers has risen significantly, and IT managers are now increasingly looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure. Organizations have embraced the benefits of IT consolidation in an effort to reduce complexity, lower costs, improve resource utilization, and protect their data. In more recent years, the term virtualization has also become synonymous with IT consolidation as an enabler of simplified IT administration and improved resource management. While the centralization of IT resources and data clearly offers the above described benefits, there are two major caveats that organizations embracing this trend must consider. The first challenge revolves around application performance. The rise of the decentralized computing model was largely driven by the need to keep IT resources closer to the distributed user base to achieve the best possible performance. Consolidating servers from remote sites reverses this distribution and, consequently, many applications suffer severe performance degradation after consolidation. To remedy these performance problems, organizations often look to upgrade the bandwidth of wide area network (WAN) links in an effort to improve application response times. Instead, CIOs often discover that upgrading bandwidth to remote sites has little or no effect on application performance, because the performance problem lies instead with latency and application protocol inefficiencies across the WAN. In addition, the cost of bandwidth upgrades can often offset a significant portion of any cost savings achieved from IT consolidation. The second consideration that organizations must weigh is the increased reliance on all of the centralized IT assets. Because these virtualized assets are more highly leveraged, meaning the infrastructure is serving more users per physical piece of hardware, the requirements for system and data availability go up dramatically. As a result, virtualized data centers must become more highly available to ensure timely access to the data that drives businesses today. This paper examines the trends towards server consolidation and virtualization, and how wide-area data services (WDS) can help IT organizations address the challenges of application performance and information availability within these environments. Furthermore, the paper discusses the combined strategic capability of both technologies in enabling infrastructure flexibility for forward-looking IT managers.
© 2008 Riverbed Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. 1 How to Address the Two Key Challenges with Virtualization
IT Consolidation - The Recent Trends With the increasing globalization of business, more than two-thirds of employees are working outside company headquarters -- in a branch office, at customer sites, on Why consolidate? the road, or at home. As workforce demographics continue to change, data at remote offices continues to grow at a rapid rate, in many cases doubling annually. 9 Simplify IT management In response to this data sprawl and distribution of IT resources, more and more 9 Reduced server and organizations are pulling back servers and applications from remote branches to software costs centrally house them in data centers. This has proven to be an effective way to 9 Improve resource manage and protect data while reducing costs and simplifying administration. utilization Main Drivers 9 Increase data security. 9The reasons to consolidate IT infrastructure, which includes files, email, Improve change applications, databases and backup infrastructure, are wide-ranging. Some of the management control key drivers are mentioned below: . Simplify IT management - As server sprawl increases, IT organizations are forced to spend more time on basic administrative tasks supporting, maintaining, and troubleshooting distributed resources. This inhibits IT's ability to work on more proactive, strat... [download for more]