What if?

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What happens if you don’t virtualise?

Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment and suggest that an enterprise in Ireland consider the prospect of not virtualising their core IT infrastructure. What would happen?

Well, let’s look at this for a minute.

Let’s say that there was a fairly large IT user, irrespective of their actual number of seats, who has made significant efforts over the last few years to have their operation run lean and efficient, achieving somewhere near that magical number of 70/30 for the ratio of project and strategic work to maintenance. The machinery is all relatively recent and is kept up to date, so the latest hardware advantages are in place already and utilisation, through effective management and deployment of applications, leveraging such techniques as clustering and load balancing, is kept at a healthy level.

Now this organisation has seen a relatively small fall in demand that has resulted from the current economic climate, but has also seen its budgets cut and the scope of its ambitions curtailed too.

With a rather flat, but consistent prediction from the analysts for its sector and its own business for the next two to three years, the organisation is quite happy with the way things are, knowing that even in three years, if they see an upswing in the economy and in demand, they servers that they have switched off as part of the cost cutting and rationalisation drive, can be lit up again and fed into the clusters to increase capability.

Is there a sufficient argument in this instance to change the whole game and go with a virtualised infrastructure?
I am not so sure. While I cannot deny the advantages of virtualisation, it seems that it has its greatest benefits where an inefficient operation and utilisation regime was already in place. In this instance, it is a game changer, but what about those operations where there was no major problem and things have been run efficiently?

Do the benefits outweigh the upset? It is hard to say. But as I am speaking hypothetically, I must still admit that the example I am basing my speculation upon may be more mythical than theoretical.

Read More: Paul Hearns