First Stages

Martin Niemer, senior VMware product marketing manager, believes only a small percentage of CIOs are at the stage where they are using virtualization to align their operations better with the business. "Many people are still at the stage of consolidating their servers and they need to finish the consolidation in order to save money before they can move on.

"2008 will be the year when lots of customers standardize on virtual technology. Over the past two years, they have been starting first deployments and creating the skill-sets. 2009 will be when many use the benefits of the virtualization and understand the advanced functionality," explains Niemer.

Niemer believes that, in future, people are going to adopt processes to reflect the benefits of virtualization, so, for example, internal approval processes that now take longer than server implementation will be accelerated. "CIOs will need to communicate to internal customers how they could decrease their deployment time if they were automating more of their processes," he says.

Ultimately, management structures face change. "The virtualization technology brings teams much closer together. Previously, teams were siloed into network, storage and server teams, but now they have to work together on combined concepts. The organization may also change," says Niemer.

CIOs who are well advanced in server virtualization are planning their next steps. Dave Thornley, service support manager of learning and IT services at Sheffield Hallam University, found that virtualization has greatly increased IT's alignment with the activities of the university. "We are increasing our support for innovation and making it much easier for someone with a bright idea to make it work," he says. "For example, we are looking more at Web 2.0 technologies to support teaching and learning, and we now have the flexibility to do that."

Such is demand that Thornley has had to rein in IT's responsiveness to requests for more servers. "We had a great rush and it was too easy to say 'yes' and then think, 'how am I supporting all this?' Now, we ask people to think about whether they can do things another way and explore the other options before we produce a server."

Two-thirds of server infrastructure at Sheffield Hallam is now virtualized and Thornley is considering desktop virtualization. "It looks easy to have a virtual desktop infrastructure, but I am not convinced it is the right way to go simply because of the types of user we have. We have nearly 40,000 users, but only 7,000 PCs. If every user generates a virtual PC, we will have to start putting limits on it."

Neil Sanderson, Microsoft UK product manager for virtualization, says: "As is often the case in IT, we tend to underestimate the human side of introducing new options. One City organization set itself up to self-service, where the users can request server capability online. They went from a 20-day procurement cycle to an SLA of half an hour, which gave them great flexibility.

"This, however, fosters a new attitude to the IT department, as users request extra capacity first thing Monday morning and expect it to be installed by mid-morning. It is going to be a challenge to stay responsive and manage SLAs as expectations change."

Sanderson identifies meeting the challenge of providing data and applications to staff when they need them as a key factor aligning IT with the business. "A mixture of staff, contractors, outsourced functions and individuals who work at home can all have access to virtualized data and applications, and so can overseas contract staff who need access to data that has to remain located physically in the UK."

Sanderson also predicts a change of culture around departmental approaches to procurement. "[Until now] departments did projects and procured some IT, and the server belonged to that department. There will now be a culture change to consolidate that and deliver as a shared service. This will drive some centralization and consolidation but, equally, if CIOs really grasp the potential as I think they have, they can give control back to the user. If you have the management tools in place, you can give users the opportunity to scale to the services they are asking for."