InfoVista Helps Enterprise Reap The Benefits Of Server Virtualisation

Published 21st June 2006

Service-Centric Performance Management Enables Move from Pilot to Production, Management of Virtual and Physical Infrastructure...

Paris, France and Herndon, VA (United States), June 21 2006 - The benefits of virtualisation have been well documented for carriers, IT outsourcers and service providers, and now enterprise users are moving towards server virtualisation as a way of fully utilising IT resources and reducing total cost of ownership. InfoVista (NASDAQ: IVTA; Euronext IFV - FR0004031649), the leading service-centric performance management software company, gives enterprise IT departments the tools they need to fully benefit from virtualisation initiatives and manage the server environment, addressing the challenges in every stage of the lifecycle: readiness assessment, planning and design, implementation, and ongoing workload optimisation and support.

Server virtualisation is an abstraction that decouples IT services from their underlying computing, storage and networking hardware dependencies. This enables infrastructure to be presented as a single pool of processing, storage and network resources, which streamlines management for IT administrators. A recent survey by IDC predicted that more than 75 per cent of all large companies are in the process of deploying virtual servers, and current users of server-virtualisation technologies report that 45 per cent of new server purchases in 2006 are expected to be virtualised.

While the promise of virtualisation is clear, it is only as good as the performance management behind it. Virtualisation requires IT administration to deal with near real-time changes in the infrastructure driven by application demands and the fluidity of the platform. Today's enterprises are accustomed to managing a more static "physical" infrastructure and the dynamic nature of virtualisation technology is perceived as a cause of uncertainty. To capitalise on the benefits and move from pilot to production, enterprises need end-to-end visibility and the ability to seamlessly manage the physical and virtual infrastructure.

"Virtualisation is clearly an area where IT departments are putting time and resources," said Debra Curtis, research vice president, Gartner. "In the long term, what Gartner refers to as the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) will enable greater infrastructure sharing across business processes in the virtual enterprise, and thus add greater flexibility and lower the cost of IT service delivery. Before you can dynamically adjust virtualised IT resources based on business priorities and service-level agreements, you must have instrumentation, performance monitoring and end-to-end IT service management, which are all prerequisites for success with RTI."

Service-centric performance management enables users to cost-effectively meet application service level objectives in an environment where an increasing number of business-critical applications are competing for shared resources. Essential capabilities such as performance management, automation, capacity planning, predictive analysis and change management fulfil this need and gives enterprise IT users the confidence and information needed to manage their virtual infrastructure. Service-centric performance management addresses problem areas inherent at each stage of the virtualisation lifecycle.

Readiness Assessment. The key objective of this stage is to assess if the server infrastructure is ripe for virtualisation and if benefits can be fully realised. This involves analysing the existing infrastructure, reviewing the overall health of IT assets, identifying which applications and servers are candidates for virtualisation and developing the roadmap that outlines the transition from a physical to virtual infrastructure. A key consideration is server capacity utilisation and performance, looking at both the current snapshot as well as the historical trend. In addition, application demands on the servers must be evaluated.

A service-centric performance management solution analyses existing systems infrastructure using real-time and historical performance reporting; identifies candidate servers ready for virtualisation; and uses predictive capabilities to assess the risks of moving to a virtual environment.

Planning and Design. This stage involves architecting a scalable solution and then creating a detailed implementation plan, the key objective being to align business demand to IT strategy. This involves choosing an optimal virtual machine configuration to transform a physical server to a virtual platform, sizing the hardware resource required to host selected virtual machines and clustering the hosts into a host farm. It is critical to ensure that infrastructure and service quality performance as perceived by end-users is not negatively affected by virtualisation.

A service-centric performance management solution helps achieve design challenges such as physical to virtual transition, impact analysis, baselining and trending in order to align the virtualisation strategy with business objectives.

Implementation. During the implementation stage, IT must employ monitoring capabilities to ensure both application and server performance are not negatively impacted as a result of virtualisation. Any design deficiency, performance issue or hardware problem detected must be quickly resolved. A service-centric performance management solution implements automated discovery, dynamic report provisioning and offers before-and-after analysis.

Ongoing Workload Optimisation and Support. Service-centric workload consolidation and optimisation is an integral part of ongoing support to fully realise virtualisation benefits and maximise ROI. The key objectives of this stage include cost-effective delivery of agreed service quality levels, and the ability to ensure high availability and accelerate problem resolution. A service-centric performance management solution provides real-time and historical performance data that can help IT administrators objectively make the right optimisation decisions, keeping the workload in mind. It also enables pre-emptive troubleshooting and fast problem resolution.

"Virtualisation is a complex and multi-tiered initiative that can yield great results if the necessary tools are in place to ensure service level objectives are met while costs are optimised," said Manuel Stopnicki, chief technology officer at InfoVista. "By taking these important steps to virtualise the server environment now, enterprises are paving the way for broader virtualisation initiatives, better service quality management and application performance management, linking the entire infrastructure and achieving higher infrastructure ROI."






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