BIZ-TECH

A revolution in your datacentre

T. Srinivasan, Managing Director, VMware India and SAARC

Modern virtualization is revolutionizing the IT industry, radically improving every dimension from the desktop through the datacentre and to the cloud.

Good news is that this transformation is not stopping here. Datacentres continue to evolve into highly automated private clouds, where the pooling of compute resources on a virtualization platform enables IT to essentially become a single, giant computer.

One heavily resonating feedback that we hear from customers and partners is that this transformational effect of virtualization is going far beyond technology to directly impacting how IT looks at the economics and cost structure of the datacentre.

Businesses of all sizes across the board can benefit from the latest developments in the datacentre technology but it is a boon for the SMBs, who face the same challenges as large enterprises but have smaller budgets to work with. Managing a virtual infrastructure allows IT professionals to optimize financial energy by reducing capital and datacentre costs to get more done with less.

With virtualization, they can reduce capital costs by as much as 60 percent.

They can also shift human energy from servicing hardware to driving the business as virtualization reduces time spent on routine administrative tasks by about a third.

The third energy saving, but definitely not the least, comes from earth's energy by using less power, cooling and real estate, and by using it more wisely.

Virtualization reduces power, cooling and real estate needs in the datacentre, cutting energy costs by up to 80 percent.

As one can expect, earth's energy is finding a larger say in the datacentre economics.

Rising energy costs and consumption in datacentres is a hot topic, whether you care about saving money, deploying new IT services, keeping the datacentre running or sparing the environment.

Organizations of all sizes are looking for relief from increasing energy demands and costs, as well as freedom from the constraints of inflexible and underutilized hardware.

The industry is now on its way towards cloud computing, and virtualization is the infrastructure on which it is being built.

The cloud model will see rapid adoption in Sri Lanka, as businesses will appreciate how the technology enables them to easily expand scalability and enhance elasticity.

Elasticity is a benefit when enterprises are growing, providing the ability to purchase infrastructure on the margin at predictable costs.

Equally as important, the elastic nature of cloud computing provides a way to cost-effectively and quickly scale down a service when it is no longer needed.

The housing choices may also be known as either internal and external clouds, but don't get caught up in the nomenclature-every vendor will have a different spin, which will only lead to confusion during their journey to the cloud.

On the enterprise level, there is another revolution brewing in the datacentre. The 'datacentre orchestration' approach, which enables workload to be automatically redistributed to meet capacity needs and take advantage of eco-friendly locations where electricity can be tapped at much lower costs. Global companies are increasingly using virtualization platforms to federate compute capacity dynamically across multiple datacentres.

This level of datacentre orchestration will become increasingly common, driven at first by the disaster recovery needs and the need to instantly migrate workloads from one site to another in the event of a failure.

And this will ramp up to the enablement of cloud computing, with cloud services providing more capabilities for importing and exporting industry-standard virtual machines to provide additional compute capacity on short notice.

HP delivers converged infrastructure in one platform

HP announced new HP Integrity solutions that significantly improve customers' service-level agreement performance, provide up to 100 percent application availability and simplify mission-critical computing for the most demanding application workloads.

The company also introduced AllianceONE, an alliance partner program that optimizes solutions across servers, storage, networking and professional services that support a mission-critical Converged Infrastructure.

Built on a new HP Blade Scale Architecture that spans servers, storage and networking, the Integrity solutions deliver the industry's first mission-critical Converged Infrastructure.

This represents the first major architectural upgrade for Integrity Superdome in a decade.

The architecture allows clients to deploy, automate and manage a complete range of applications side by side, within the same enclosure, and using the same components, tools and processes.

With a single management environment, clients can maintain consistent control of the entire IT infrastructure.

HP is the only vendor delivering a unified BladeSystem platform that spans x86 to HP Superdome 2.

As a result, HP clients can create data centers that allow them to spend less time on operations, and instead focus their resources on driving innovation to address business needs.

The new Integrity portfolio includes servers, software and services that provide clients: up to 450 percent improvement in infrastructure reliability over previous generations with the new HP Integrity Superdome.

Built on the unified Blade Scale Architecture, Integrity Superdome 2 delivers more than 100 new mission-critical innovations to provide breakthrough availability.

Its unique Crossbar Fabric increases system resiliency by intelligently routing data between blades and input/output ports with complete redundancy.

AllianceONE, HP's new solutions-based alliance partner program across servers, storage and networking, provides software vendors, hardware vendors and systems integrators greater simplicity and faster return on IT investments.

Through AllianceONE, alliance partners access a single program that offers the broadest choice of industry solutions designed for an HP Converged Infrastructure.

HP Converged Infrastructure is built on a standards-based architecture across Microsoft Windows, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and HP NonStop platforms.

This enables clients and partners to build leading solutions that are flexible and adaptable to meet changing business demands.

FITIS hardware chapter appoints new committee

A new Executive Council for the Hardware Chapter of Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS) was appointed at the AGM held recently.

Sri Lanka Computer Vendors Association (SLCVA) established in 1992 is a founder member of FITIS and plays a significant role in developing and promoting ICT in Sri Lanka as the Hardware chapter of FITIS.

The newly elected SLCVA President Wasantha Weerakoon said "FITIS Hardware Chapter membership is taking the initiative to introduce latest and innovative ICT products and services to Sri Lanka which is striving to position itself as the knowledge hub of the region". He also mentioned, arrangements are underway to hold the INFOTEL 2010 Sri Lanka ICT Expo in Oct 2010 and the annual Intel ICT industry cricket tournament in a grand scale.

He said all members of his association, together with the rest of the members of FITIS, intend to take more initiatives to develop and promote the use of ICT in the country.