Sign up now and get the best business technology insights direct to your inbox.Arthur Cole spoke with Andrew Wachs, virtualization segment manager, IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Cole: With virtualization undergoing such rapid development these days, it's difficult for many IT managers to see an end game. How do you see virtual infrastructures evolving, and what capabilities will they ultimately bring to the data center?
Wachs: While we see IT managers taking a very deliberate approach to implementing virtualization, in parallel the technology is maturing, which will give companies a continuous stream of benefits. We see trends in three key areas that will help IT managers further their quest to contain IT complexity and cost and bolster agility: the evolution beyond server consolidation, advanced virtualization, and delivering IT as a service.
Technology has enabled virtualization to evolve beyond server consolidation and now virtualization of resources across all layers of the architecture is a reality. IBM solutions include virtualization of servers, storage, networks, clients, applications (which includes application infrastructure, like application servers) and service management, which provides the connective tissue that enables virtual resources to be discovered, monitored, metered and secured, and have deployment of virtualized resources automated.
Second, advanced virtualization techniques together with service management techniques are evolving the level of automation available for IT infrastructures. We see increasing levels of automation being implemented in IT service deployments having the advantage of optimizing energy consumption and workload performance (and SLA achievability), integrating high-availability functions to ensure continuous service delivery and simplifying disaster tolerance. Third, as IT infrastructures progress on these scales of scope of resource virtualization and automation, we believe that companies will move more swiftly to a model where IT is delivered as a service using cloud computing properties, both in-house and through public service providers. Advanced virtualization can help companies create a more efficient platform for delivering cloud-based services.
Cole: IBM has laid out servers, storage, applications and systems management in its virtual portfolio. Is this where the company's boundaries lie, or will the package extend into areas like desktop solutions or even networking?
Wachs: IBM's virtual portfolio includes server, storage, applications and service management, but also includes solutions for client or desktop virtualization and network virtualization today. IBM will evolve its technology across all of these essential elements to what we refer to as a dynamic virtual infrastructure. IBM has a robust solution called its Virtual Client Solution, which enables companies to centrally manage client images to lower support costs and improve security. We also offer innovative technology to consolidate desktop images to reduce storage. As part of our Virtual Client Solution, IBM offers its Virtual Infrastructure Assess services, which can be either project-based or managed services. Transforming a physical client architecture to a virtual client infrastructure can be a daunting task. Our Virtual Infrastructure Assess service helps clients plan, design and implement a solution, which lowers risk and reduces project time and company resource involvement. IBM also offers network virtualization features in many of its server virtualization offerings today. For example, IBM enables servers to virtualize network adapters to reduce the number of physical network devices needed. We also offer the BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager, which virtualizes SAN and LAN connections, making server deployment faster and easier while increasing availability with automatic blade-server failover. IBM offers networking virtualization services to help customers ensure that the enterprise's data network is ready for server virtualization. We are working to expand our network virtualization offerings with capabilities to integrate the management of servers, storage and network-based virtualized resources to help administrators gain better visibility and control over the deployment and allocation of resources.
Cole: The Transitive acquisition is also very interesting in light of its cross-platform capabilities. How will its technology bolster IBM's offerings?
Wachs: The Transitive portfolio will support the growing trend of customers migrating their workloads to IBM Systems and help make the job easier. IBM is focused on helping its customers achieve the most pressing goals of today's environment: reducing costs and streamlining infrastructures. IBM plans to continue to offer its PowerVM Lx86 product, which is based on Transitive technology. IBM is evaluating Transitive's other products as part of its overall systems product strategy. At this time, we are not prepared to discuss specific technology roadmaps.
Cole: How much convergence will there be between the virtualization infrastructures being deployed today and the cloud infrastructures that are just around the corner? How should IT managers prepare their virtual systems for the cloudy future?
Wachs: We believe that organizations will seek to utilize cloud computing as a vehicle for unleashing business innovation and agility. The method of deployment will vary from organizations wanting to subscribe to services over a public cloud, to those that want to set up their own private cloud for delivering services to their employees and customers, to hybrid models where both methods are used. Both the delivery of IT as a service, and a highly virtualized, flexible infrastructure will be foundational technologies for delivering cloud-based services in both private and public clouds.
The cloud service provider will apply technologies and approaches such as virtualization at all layers of the architecture to assure that they are able to pool and share their resources to provide rapid delivery, isolation, flexibility, etc. of service. They will also seek to implement service management capability to assure the delivery of cloud services. For example, they would want to assure performance, availability and change management for these services. We would expect that in the organizations of the future, you will find highly virtualized infrastructures coupled with service management used for delivery of a myriad of business and IT services over a myriad of architectures, from dedicated workload pools, to private cloud solutions to standardized services subscribed through public clouds to federated clouds comprised of potentially dynamic combinations of infrastructures. Virtualization will enable agile infrastructure around the world to provide more choices for organizations based on service quality requirements, like security and performance, privacy restrictions, compliance requirements and other factors.
Cole: Is there a danger of introducing too much virtualization too fast? How crucial is it to get management capabilities in place early to avoid some of the horror stories we hear about virtualization gone wild?
Wachs: Yes. Good management tools and practices are critical to a successful implementation of virtualization. Just as our customers have felt the pain of physical server and storage sprawl, they are now vulnerable to virtualized resource sprawl. To avoid the pitfalls of virtualization, IBM recommends that clients embark on a four-step process when implementing virtualization: Develop a strategy, preferably using IBM best practices; consolidate, to reduce complexity and costs; virtualize, to dynamically adapt; and manage, to visualize, control and automate.
The deployment of both management technologies and practices is essential for a successful virtualization experience. We start by helping clients manage both physical and virtual environments from a single console using our Systems Director solution and Tivoli Service Management Suite. These solutions are tightly integrated, which means, for example, virtual hardware metrics from Systems Director can be inserted into Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), which can be used with other data that ITM collects for broader monitoring, eventing, reporting, performance and capacity management. The ability to combine detailed hardware metrics from Systems Director with ITM helps troubleshoot IT issues and helps maximize availability and quality of IT services for both physical and virtual environments. The data from Systems Director can also be stored in the Tivoli Data Warehouse, making it available to other Tivoli solutions such as Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager, a solution that accurately collects and analyzes shared computing resource usage, which is especially important in a virtualized environment. This helps to better understand IT costs in a virtualized environment and facilitates the tracking, allocation and billing by department, user and many additional criteria. These offerings may be combined with popular virtual infrastructure software, such as VMware, including VirtualCenter for an end-to-end solution. For example, IBM Systems Director interoperates with VMware VirtualCenter and VMotion to create a high-availability solution in the VMware environment. A Predictive Failure Alert from the hardware can be used with an Event Action Plan to automatically and seamlessly migrate some or all VMs from a failing server to a healthy server leveraging VMotion.
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