Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

CIO Perspectives
By John Gavin

How to Convince Your Boss You Need a Virtual Infrastructure Management Solution

By John Gavin

Gone are the days when simply telling your boss that you needed the coolest virtual infrastructure management product just like all the other cool companies doing production virtualization would get it for you . Let’s face it. That won’t work these days when layers of approval are common place, endless questions on capital purchases are the norm and budgets are tighter than ever with ROI and TCO part of every ones lexicon and reason for buying. Ok, so what do you do to get the boss into your camp? There are really three areas you should highlight to get your boss to say yes.

The first is an old standby – time to resolve problems. Your first line of defense is that the traditional element management tools you have for physically dedicated environments can be useful, but just don’t cut across all the devices and see the levels of virtual abstraction to give that integrated system view which is vital to understanding virtual environments. Those older tools aren’t designed to see through and track all the virtualized elements because they were designed to support one device type in a silo-like fashion. You know the endless hours that are wasted chasing data, going to meetings or sitting on conference calls trying to find the culprits involved in performance problems that are impacting critical application availability, could all be avoided. You suggest even a conservative assumption of reducing this wasted, always unplanned, activity by 50% would be worth the purchase alone. The average Akorri BalancePoint customer with 100 VMs can identify over $500,000 in staff productivity annually.
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October 13, 2009 | Filed Under Customer Experiences, Performance, Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment 

The X and Y ROI of Data Center Virtualization

By John Gavin

For my first blog I decided to tackle the common ROI topic so prevalent these days. There are various forms of ROI and TCO one gets from virtualization. The easier and first ROI to identify and quantify is what I call the “X” ROI which typically happens in that Stage 1, or server consolidation phase, of virtualization adoption. That ROI you get literally out of the box so to speak. It comes in Stage 1 of moving into a virtual IT infrastructure where you do the initial P to V projects and the focus here is server consolidation where getting a many to one consolidation savings is huge.

The second aspect or wave of getting a better ROI, thus what I call the “Y” ROI, is a lot trickier to get a handle on and is typically experienced in the Stage 2 and 3 phases of virtualization adoption. While the Hypervisor technologies out there have done a tremendous job of getting the underlying physical resources more productive, unleashing lots of untapped capability, there has been a major gap created in solutions that make the IT virtualization operations management job easier, especially when considering staffing is flat or down, physical and virtual resources co-exist and must be co-managed and everyone wants to develop a plan to get a private cloud someday, sooner rather than later.
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August 14, 2009 | Filed Under Virtual infrastructure management | Leave a Comment