"Server Virtualisation Addresses Business Dynamics."

In an interaction with Biztech2.0, Daya Prakash, IT Head, LG Electronics India Limited, talks about server virtualisation and its different aspects.

Please share your view on server virtualisation

The key factor to measure the success of IT in any organisation is to find out how well it is integrated with the business. The level of dependency on IT to perform the business of an organisation, reflects the success of IT in the organization, while at the same time poses challenges for CIOs to manage the ever growing demands of managing a complex infrastructure.

Increasing the number of applications (domain wise specialized solutions), and heterogeneous architecture to support business, results in two major challenges, namely, the efficiency of managing IT operations and cost effectiveness. Server virtualisation is one solution which tries to address such concerns raised by the dynamics of the business / IT management.

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Server virtualisation gives flexibility to host multiple applications on the same physical server. Thus, helping in reducing the number of servers required to support multiple applications. Some of the key benefits of server virtualisation are, increased utilization, increased flexibility, increased performance, increased availability, reduced spending on server procurement and redirecting funds in more strategic avenues.

How has the availability of multiple options influenced your decision of server virtualisation?

As I had said earlier, the main challenge faced by CIOs today is the management of operations efficiently, which means catering to the constantly increasing demands of business support through systems, in terms of availability, uptime and performance This would also involve managing the costs with equal or more efficiency.

With shrinking budgets, data centre space crunch and increased energy consumption costs, organisations are forced to look for alternatives. Some of the methods that we have opted for, to combat these issues include, clustering which helps in fulfilling increased demand for performance from applications and server virtualisation which helps in addressing the issue of efficiency at a broad level.

In addition to that, we have also incurred benefits such as increased utilisation, increased flexibility and redirecting funds in more strategic avenues.

What is your view of pay per use in server virtualisation?

This is one method that allows CIOs to shift IT risk to vendors and trim operating costs in the process. I strongly feel that when it comes to the ‘mission critical’ application, it requires a lot of understanding of the nature of the business, the organisational culture and a deep knowledge of its resources. One needs to categorize the application from the criticality point of view. One can choose from options such as, buying the infrastructure and managing it in-house, only hosting in-house and hosting outside or pay per use.

Have you virtualised your server environment at LG?

Yes, we do have a server virtualised environment. Some of the benefits that we have incurred from that include, hardware capacity planning v/s utilization, administration cost saving, flexibility of DR, increased scalability and shorter life cycle for introducing new application.

There have been conscious efforts at LG to overcome challenges posed by the business today and we have opted for numerous combinations of solutions.