EMA Research Reveals Effective Virtual Systems Mgmt Outcomes

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), an IT management research and consulting firm, has released its latest research paper titled, ‘Best Practices in Virtual Systems Management (VSM): Virtualisation Metrics and Recommendations for Enterprises’.

Based on data from an in-depth survey of companies with active virtualisation deployments, this report analyses 18 key VSM disciplines and provides real-world metrics for 17 VSM outcomes. It also categorises outcomes for the best and worst performers in VSM. The survey indicates that the companies with the best practices in VSM saw substantial staff efficiencies. The best performers were able to manage their virtualisation deployments with more than 85 percent fewer administrators.

“Organisations with better VSM achieve measurable business benefits and significant RoI outcomes – like faster time-to-market for new products and services, improvements to customer service, reduced operational costs, more effective channel and partner capabilities, faster response to business demands and an improved ability to attract and retain the best staff,” said Andi Mann, EMA research director and study leader.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

Enterprise Management Associates’ research indicates that better response times, faster provisioning and improved efficiency are just of the few improvements seen with the use of specific VSM toolsets and best practices. Additional findings in this report include:

- Best practices in VSM result in much lower administration costs, with the best performers saving over $3,300 per additional virtual machine (VM) on staff costs alone.

- Best practices in VSM result in faster problem resolution and better uptime, with the best performers able to achieve an average of ‘five nines’ (99.999 percent) availability – less than one second of downtime per day.

- Best practices in VSM provide extraordinary advantages for system deployment, with the best performers able to deploy a new system more than 240 times faster.

- Best practices in VSM greatly improve server consolidation ratios, with the best performers able to reduce the actual number of physical servers in use by 35 percent or more.

- Best practices in VSM greatly improve resource utilisation, with the best performers able to run their virtualisation deployment on about half as many physical servers.

- Best practices in VSM deliver significant results for green IT initiatives, with the majority of enterprises able to prove a measurable reduction in power consumption since deploying virtualisation.

The most successful VSM users have seen solid, measurable results. EMA suggests that enterprises use the advice and findings in this report to measure themselves against their peers, pinpoint their weak spots and start to correct them by deploying better processes. This will not only lead to measurable results for IT, but for the entire business, by allowing virtual systems to expand and deliver on virtualisation goals.