Cutting Costs Through Virtualization

Microsoft puts it quite bluntly, "virtualization is a technology that helps customers save money."  Now that is definitely a universally appealing statement. With Microsoft's dedication to bringing virtualization from the "desktop to the datacenter," businesses can finally leverage the power and efficiency of their IT infrastructure to its fullest extent.   We can now have truly dynamic datacenters whose functionality responds to the needs of any organization, as opposed to an organization working around the datacenter's limitations and burdening costs.  Virtualization maximizes the utilization and capabilities of IT resources, allowing any organization to fully harness the power of their investment, save money and even reallocate their IT budget to other areas of their business.

To begin, let's take a look at some of the top issues businesses face when dealing with IT.

The fact here, is that IT is meant to be a business enabler.  Consulting firms have to ask themselves, "How can we become quicker in responding to the business and more agile in supporting the business."  Consultants need to help businesses jump onto any new opportunity whenever it happens, and right now, virtualization is that opportunity.  The goal is to connect these customer "pain points," challenges, and pitfalls to a virtualization solution, which does indeed exist for all of the above concerns.  Virtualization can drive costs down through server consolidation, energy reduction, space reduction, and ease of administration.  It increases IT efficiency through rapid provisioning and high availability, which helps maintain business continuity.  Business agility is enabled and enhanced by virtualization, and it facilitates the growth of dynamic datacenters, along with accelerated responsiveness.

Now let's get a broad overview of what virtualization is.  In essence, virtualization provides an abstraction layer that allows multiple operating systems, services, or applications to run on a single device while being isolated from each other.  The goal here is that by separating operating systems and applications from the physical hardware, it makes them easier to manage and easier to respond to the needs of the business.  The majority of companies have already begun to leverage this technology.  In a study conducted by the Yankee Group in 2008-2009 regarding global virtualization deployment and usage, they found that 72% of SMB's are planning to deploy at least server virtualization technology in the near future.  So why are businesses excited about Microsoft virtualization?  Well, for one, server virtualization is generally one-third the cost of an equivalent VMware solution.  Also, Microsoft is the only company to offer a full range of products and solutions, which includes server virtualization, application virtualization, presentation virtualization, desktop virtualization and user-state virtualization.  This 360 degree approach really takes virtualization from the "desktop to the datacenter."

To get a quick overview of what virtualization can do, here is a graphic produced from a study conducted by Microsoft.  It shows the cost savings though the adoption of baseline best practices, which includes virtualization.  You can see here that virtualization allows the cost per user to go down as the ability to manage servers and applications goes up.  The results for the rationalized solution are staggering, just look at the IT labor cost per user which dropped nearly 99%!

Some other real world examples show us the tangible benefits.

• Heidelberg University estimated that it was able to reduce compatibility testing and save approximately 50,000 Euros ($73,616) annually in packaging costs using Application Virtualization. They said, "It paid for itself in just six months."
• California State University now required just 10 hours, instead of 700 hours, to package and deliver applications. This type of accelerated desktop deployment also helped AspenTech cut its application delivery time by 50%.
• Ahmed Atef from Mantrac states that "Our people are also finding it easier to work wherever they are-whether they are at a customer site, roaming between sites, or on the road...When our employees are more productive, we decrease our costs." Presentation virtualization helps assist in this cost-effective anywhere access scenario.

As you can see, virtualization can really help an organization achieve new heights and allows them to cut costs significantly. Virtualization solution savings are real across the board and just make sense.  It is also important to keep in mind that a virtualization solution exists for any size business, not just large corporations.  Rapid provisioning, ease of management, and anywhere access is truly key to having an agile and robust business of any size.  Management can test, package, and deliver new solutions faster and more efficiently than ever before.  Businesses gain when they can quickly and seamlessly take advantage of new technologies and use their IT function to deliver those technologies.   However, scalability and expandability of datacenters (small and large) is becoming increasingly complex and harder to manage, not to mention the associated costs involved.  IT professionals can provide a better means to adopt new technologies, as well as scale and manage an infrastructure by utilizing virtualization.  They can even effectively tailor your existing infrastructure to better suit your business requirements.  In essence, virtualization simplifies so many aspects of IT because it eliminates routine activities that waste time, it consolidates vital network components together, and it can provide complete, secure control over the entire environment.   Let's take a look at some additional bullet points.

There is also a whole suite of tools available which assist in the planning and deployment of any virtualization technology.  Microsoft's Solution Accelerators will comb through your network,  automatically inventory it, and provide guidance on what pieces are good candidates for virtualization.  They will give recommendations from the desktop up to the servers, identify workloads in the environment, and give a full map of what's going on.  This is a great first step to see where your organization is currently at, and allowing you to build a roadmap on where you want to be.  The Virtualization ROI tool gives detailed benefits analysis and allows companies to see where their ROI will come from before any moves are actually made.  The Hyper-Green tool calculates savings that will result through consolidation and improved power management.  This is great for organizations that are looking for tax savings for being environmentally friendly.  Additionally, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit is great for assessing a customer's current environment and recommending the right technologies.  It can also generate reports which can be used for different migration scenarios and will take you from the beginning planning stages all the way through the deployment. There are also many case studies and white papers located at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization.

Virtualization is indeed the solution that will be able to truly take full advantage of your IT investment.  It is essentially the tool that can successfully and efficiently align your business processes with your IT function.  That alignment is what IT consultants strive for and just as IT is a business enabler, virtualization is now an IT enabler, as well as an IT optimizer.