The Business Case
Often the business case to implement virtualization in your IT environment is compelling. One of the principle reasons for conducting a Strategic Virtualization Assessment is to provide specific evidence used in the business case. (The other main reason is to inform the design of the solution.)
Sample DataCenter Virtualization Business Case Components
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Server Investment - As an example, for data center consolidation, savings is calculated based on the ratio of virtual servers that run simultaneously on one physical server. For instance for a 10:1 savings ratio, a 150 server environment would be reduced to 150 virtual servers running on 15 physical servers.
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Supporting Infrastructure Investment - Following the example above there would be a SIGNIFICANT reduction in: Network ports, racks, and physical space.
- Power & Heat Dissipation Costs: With the reduction in servers, power and heat dissipation costs are specifically reduced, usually by more than 50%.
- Streamline IT Resources:
- Server provisioning leadtime from 4-6 weeks to 1-2 days
- Actual server provisioning from 20-40 hours to less than 1 hour
- Moving application to new server 4-6 hours for migration to 5-10 minutes
- Hardware maintenance downtime window from 1-3 hours to Zero downtime (with tools such as Virtual Iron's LiveMigrate and VMware's VMotion)
Added up, the resulting data is compelling to move forward with virtualization!
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