In Your Virtualisation Journey, Look At The Big Picture

For CIOs embarking on the virtualisation journey, it is essential to take a holistic view as there are various elements involved. Some questions playing on their mind are what should be the starting point – whether to get started with storage, network, server – and how to move forward?

Getting Started

The first step should be listing out an IT hassles map, pain points and prioritise them in business terms. After that, think of ways and means to resolve it. For instance, if you think of consolidating IT infrastructure and optimising it with virtualisation, then work backwards on Why? What? When? How? How Much? In the end, virtualisation should deliver much more benefits than the actual cost and effort of carrying it out.

CIOs should constitute an IT council with business leaders and get buy-in, funds and commitment. The CIO is an enabler and differentiator in this initiative. Once he/she has the business backing, the entire initiative can be split in phases to be carried out step-wise so that at each and every step, fine-tuning and improvement can be done before moving on to the next. Pressure points to be taken care of here would be desktop, servers, storage, and building the right architecture which is scalable, reliable, performance oriented, agile and flexible and most importantly is easy to manage.

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Working On The Components

As far as network and servers are concerned, they need deep thinking with right architecture, fabric to connect to desktops, servers and apps. To put in layman’s terms, SAN or NAS should be designed to meet each of your organisation’s needs just like you would design a suit with available cloth and the best design.

It is also important at this stage to decide whether the applications qualify for virtualisation or not. It would be better to re-architect applications if required and then virtualise them. Otherwise, just leave traditional applications as they are.

Getting The Bottom Line Right

Usually, a successful journey of virtualisation would take around three to five years, depending on complexity, sensitivity and the organisation’s unique business needs, processes and issues. CIOs have been very successful in recent years in making it successful and scale up with the help of right vendors and right technologies.

The bottom line is that the business should appreciate and promote such technologies with comfort, confidence and cultural shift to such technology enablers, and then start on the journey to the cloud.

Maximising Virtualisation Investments

Once the virtualisation strategy is up and running, here are tips for CIOs in terms of how they can draw maximum value from their virtualisation initiatives. The primary objective for the CIO is to deliver business value: be not only a business enabler, but also a differentiator for business and services offered, and thus a well-respected leader in the organisation.

Tips To Maximising Virtualisation Investments:

• Do your math well. Have a logical approach which is not biased to any particular technology.

• Keep a track of your virtualisation strategy. Is it fit for the long term or can it lead to problems in the coming three to five years?

• Make communication better, simple and effective for leadership buy-in and management sponsorship.

• Plan clearly in phased manner.

• Review at every stage and mitigate risks. Remember, success comes from how well you managed these challenges.

• Desktop, servers are good starting points for Phase-1 of virtualisation. Applications, storage and network need deep dive for looking at complex issues and resolving them.

• Measure and manage every stage, accept failures honestly and resolve issues in the interest of the organisation. Look at the BIG Picture.