MANILA, Philippines- It plays a vital role in modern enterprises, smoothening business processes and informing both strategic and tactical decisions.
Consequently, the IT function is under constant pressure to fine-tune IT infrastructure to make it perform better and enable the organization to respond quickly to an ever-changing environment.
In addition, the IT organization now has to deliver services quickly to users so they can become more productive and efficient. And it has to do all these while keeping a handle on costs.
To deliver upon its now more demanding mandate, an increasing number of enterprises have embarked on optimization initiatives such as virtualization and its extension, cloud computing.
Both involve the use of shared infrastructure (primarily servers, storage and network resources) and serve up a multitude of benefits.
These benefits include simplified physical IT infrastructure, lower TCO, scalability, resilience and reliability, enhanced security and outage recovery, and faster service delivery.
But while virtualization and cloud computing are beneficial, they also introduce new challenges. Take hypervisors as an example.
In essence software for managing virtual machines, a hypervisor is installed on server hardware dedicated to running guest operating systems. More often than not, several hypervisors are used in a single virtualized environment.
Given that each hypervisor comes with its own management tools, and that there is typically very little integration among the different sets of tools, performing tasks (for example, provisioning workloads) across multiple hypervisors can be a challenge.
Virtual world not without challenges
Tellingly, a recent IDC survey found IT decision-makers responsible for managing virtualized environments indicating their most important challenges as those relating to reducing complexity (76.1 percent), integrating virtual and physical server management (73.1 percent), standardizing management processes (71.1 percent), improving virtual server lifecycle operations (69.7 percent), and reducing virtual machine sprawl (65.2 percent).
To get the best ROI from their virtualization efforts, enterprises and their IT practitioners need to first recognize that operational activities (problem management, approval, configuration, provisioning, and so on) in a virtualized environment are different from those in a traditional environment.
In a virtualized environment, the needs of multiple business groups and application environments are supported by a common pool of resources. Accordingly, operational activities have to be approached on a more automated, integrated and coordinated basis, with a view to managing the entire virtualized environment as a cohesive whole.
Dell’s Virtual Integrated System (VIS) enables enterprises to do just this.
Common, easy-to-manage resource pool
Designed to provide an open, cross-vendor data center platform that boosts IT efficiency and take advantage of advances in virtualization and cloud computing, VIS unifies server, storage, and networking assets into a common resource pool that can be managed using common tools, enabling IT managers to provision and automate infrastructure management at every layer — physical or virtual — using any leading hypervisor.
Dell’s VIS architecture addresses the people and processes needed to efficiently operate a data center, and is unique in that it works with a customer’s existing architecture and their current products and investments — whether from Dell or another provider.
“Dell recognizes businesses have made significant technology purchases and its approach to converged architectures allows them to preserve and fully leverage their existing data center infrastructure without creating technology silos or undertaking a rip-and-replace strategy,” said Ricky Lopez, country manager for commercial business.
The Dell VIS architecture consists of three key components:
• Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager
The Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) simplifies data center management by enabling a single administrator to allocate server, storage and network resources — each server image is given its own “persona” — against application workloads.
The solution can bring together heterogeneous hardware offerings and leading virtualization hypervisors to create virtual pools of resources that are easy to manage.
AIM abstracts the hardware and virtualization layers from the data center so that customers can focus on allocating a single pool of resources instead of managing various technologies.
• Dell VIS Self-Service Creator
Dell’s VIS Self-Service Creator can shorten the time it takes to deploy new business applications by standardizing and automating the way applications are deployed.
The component has a Web-based portal that enables authorized users to select, deploy and manage a customized catalogue of IT applications and resources, reducing the time it takes to deploy a workload to just minutes.
The VIS Self-Service Creator can increase IT control while accelerating IT processes, adding up to savings in time and resources. All this is done seamlessly with the ability to orchestrate these services across multi-vendor hardware and software solutions.
• Dell VIS Director
The Dell VIS Director is the IT operations hub for the virtual environment, giving customers a comprehensive view of virtual dependencies and enabling customers to quickly identify issues within the virtual environment.
The module includes advanced reporting, what-if and trend analysis, capacity and utilization reporting and cost allocation and chargeback solutions, giving IT operators a greater level of visibility into their IT environment and better information upon which to take action.
With the VIS Director, enterprises can efficiently manage their current environment and plan for the future more effectively.
These three components are complemented by a range of services capabilities that helps customers assess, design and implement the VIS into new or existing IT environments.
Transiting to cloud-like computing
Using the Dell VIS architecture and services, enterprises can transition new and existing technologies to an open, cloud-like model that dynamically provisions application workloads and unifies heterogeneous compute, storage and networking assets into a common resource pool.
“This way, they can respond to changes faster by selecting and deploying standard IT resources almost instantly, customize workflows to help automate common tasks associated with workload deployment, and cost-effectively deliver right-sized IT capability at the right service levels and support business growth while keeping existing resources under control,” said Lopez.
Learn how so many organizations worldwide have benefited from Dell’s strategic approach to greater cost savings and enhanced enterprise efficiency in the virtual era. Join the South Asia Technology Tour 2011-Philippine Leg, Efficiency for the Virtual Era on June 15 at the Peninsula Manila. For more information, visit www.dellasia-techtour2011.com or contact Full Circle Events Asia Inc. at 415-2208 or 412-1057; look for Divine Areno.