Enabling Business Services with Virtualization and Network

Vernon Turner is the Senior Vice President of IDC's Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and Sustainability Research. He discusses some of the IT transformations that will have a significant impact on how we plan, build, and manage our data centers. The evolution of IT infrastructure is being heavily influenced by consolidation, virtualization, and automation as enterprise IT customers work to increase service levels and lower costs while introducing the flexibility necessary to keep up with rapidly changing business needs. IDC research shows that diligence is needed concerning the progress and improvements inside the data center walls, while an increasingly connected and intelligent world outside will put even more pressure on IT management. Therefore, virtualization must be mission-critical.

Most IT customers will move business-critical and mission-critical applications into a virtualized environment. Consequently, they must ensure that each virtual machine has sufficient access to processor, memory, and I/O resources to enable good performance and smooth operations via testing. This second-phase virtualization will be characterized by automation, portfolio management, capacity management, enhanced governance, and improved availability. More importantly, network architecture must be rethought so that it can better support a growing array of mobile devices in the enterprise. A number of virtual cloud applications that are accessed from mobile devices are latency-sensitive, which will cause incremental traffic across the entire ecosystem, from the campus to the data center. As a result, a secure and efficacious network should excel in application performance and adapt quickly to future needs.