Virtualisation for a dynamic infrastructure

Virtualisation is a key building block of a dynamic infrastructure.

By making the infrastructure much more flexible, virtualisation can enable IT resources to be allocated faster, more cost effectively and more dynamically - and help you respond to the challenges of changing demand levels and new business requirements.

To achieve the best outcome, organisations are virtualising at all layers of the architecture, from servers to desktops, storage, networks, and applications - while also adopting new methods of automation and service management -- to help reduce cost, improve service and manage risk.

Reduce cost

Virtualisation is helping organisations achieve breakthrough productivity gains and contain operational cost and complexity.

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  While significantly increased IT utilisation is the primary advantage, virtualisation enables IT managers to recapture valuable floor space. With fewer physical machines to operate, companies have realised dramatic savings on power, cooling, management and other infrastructure costs.

  IBM helps you reduce costly downtime, free up staff, minimise licensing costs, automate operations and get more value from your IT investments with innovative solutions, software, services and platforms for meeting your virtualisation requirements.

  For example, through the use of IBM virtualisation capabilities, a medical centre reported $US 80M in capital and operational cost savings and a 220% increase in capacity--without increasing support staff.

Improve Service

With virtualisation, applications can be decoupled from hardware -- greatly reducing the time needed to deploy new services from weeks to hours or even minutes.

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  It also enables you to dynamically refine the way resources are assigned so that they continually meet service level agreements.

  For example, the manager of Linux at a large Insurance company told us: "With the virtualised infrastructure, we can provision servers literally in minutes...Rapid provisioning lets us try things that we'd never have considered attempting before...It promotes out-of-the-box thinking because the risk cost is so low. What virtualisation really gives us is a strong foundation for innovation."

  Despite offering many advantages, one challenge virtualisation presents is the difficulty of managing a virtual infrastructure layered over a physical infrastructure. IBM management solutions provide visibility, control and automation you need to effectively manage your virtualised environments, delivering an integrated solution to manage your resources, dynamic workloads, and services.

Manage risk

Virtualisation is the foundation on which organisations can build high availability and disaster recovery infrastructures with optimal system, network and application performance.

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  Early virtualisation adopters have reduced IT complexity and increased resilience in their IT infrastructures. Managing and securing data without affecting its availability has been a long-standing IT challenge. Now, there is a compelling answer--virtualisation.

  Today's challenging business environments require solutions that ensure information availability and recovery at the best possible speed. IBM virtualisation capabilities include solutions that are designed to deliver near zero downtime operation for companies' IT infrastructures.

  For example, a major shoe manufacturer, believes: "The centralised infrastructure provided by IBM saves on costs and ensures that our operations are maintained even in the event of a catastrophe."