Infrastructure virtualisation is ready to go company-wide

“We see ‘Total Enterprise Virtualisation’ quickly becoming the only viable way for companies large and small to gain maximum value from their desktop, server and storage systems,” says Aaron Schneider, director of services at The Pinnacle Group. “By virtualising the total infrastructure versus one element or another, the benefits become exponential,” he adds. This group believes the idea has been made possible by the adoption of VMware server virtualisation and the maturity and affordability of virtual SAN (storage area network) software like DataCore’s SANmelody. That and the emergence of-complementary products and services developed around VMware’s success, as well as major entrants like Microsoft, are driving scaled up virtualisation forward, and with it new and better ways to effect consolidation, flexibility and hardware independence. “We now have the products and services expertise to design and implement Total Enterprise Virtualisation solutions,” says Mike Strohl, president of VMware consultant Entisys Solutions. “VMware server opened the broader market to understanding that virtualisation can liberate IT resources and services from the limitations of physical devices, enabling them to be used more efficiently. Once that is understood, it really doesn’t make sense to stop with servers, now that products such as DataCore SANmelody are available.” And Sean Burke, president of Govplace, adds: “Storage virtualisation is the perfect complement to server consolidation. Without it, the flexibility derived from server virtualisation is quickly attenuated when it runs into the physical limitations of storage. Storage virtualisation picks up where server virtualisation leaves off, extending those benefits across the entire infrastructure.” Virtualisation infrastructure firm Foedus’ president and CEO Mike Reilly insists that enterprise virtualisation’s time has come. “We are just emerging from the period of initial buy-in to the server consolidation revolution. For many, storage virtualisation had remained an expensive, high-end, data centre solution – until DataCore made it practical for all implementations.”