Patrick Irwin,  product manager at Citrix looks at how virtualisation is affecting the data centre

Virtualisation is transforming the manner in which enterprises deliver resources from their data centres to their desktops. The technology, named by analyst Gartner as one of the hottest technologies of 2008, is underpinning a transition in how data centres are used. From traditional storage houses for applications and operating systems, virtualisation is turning data centres into the next generation platform of ‘delivery centres’, enabling companies to make better use of their existing hardware assets.

Today’s fast paced business environment requires organisations to become much more agile, starting with their data centre. Inflexible, hard-wired infrastructures are no longer cost effective and don’t meet most enterprise needs. According to Gartner, about 90 per cent of business processes are captured in software; therefore the ability to deliver applications and desktops to users anytime, anywhere from their data centre is rapidly becoming a core focus for most organisations.

As such, virtualisation is revolutionising the way IT conducts its mission to provide infrastructure services to businesses. The global virtualisation market, spurred by the increasing popularity of server virtualisation together with the development of desktop virtualisation, is expected to grow at 113 per cent over the next three years according to IDC. The research consultancy believes global virtualisation services – which were worth $5.5 billion last year – will increase to a value of $11.7 billion by 2011.

The driving force for many has been, and will continue to be, the way in which virtualisation offers real, tangible benefits, both in terms of IT efficiency and business performance. It has long been seen as a way of achieving a lower cost of infrastructure management and a higher level of agility.

Looking at work we have carried out with our own customers, virtualisation technologies promise a number of benefits to business, from consolidating servers to reducing costs, increasing scalability and – as it continues to grow in importance – ‘greening’ IT systems. It allows users to access resources – be it application or their desktop – from remote handheld devices such as a mobile phone or BlackBerry.

However, mass adoption of this kind often throws up a few challenges. As the number of virtual machines deployed within the enterprise grows, the time required to manually provision and configure each virtual machine may drive IT costs up. The user interface may become crowded and unwieldy, again increasing costs. With multiple virtual machines running on a single server the risk to the business of server failure will increase.

But these challenges can be overcome. In order to tackle the pressures associated with growing numbers of virtual machines, it is important to carefully consider a virtualisation platform that can mitigate the risks associated with the technology. It is important for companies to ascertain whether their virtualisation platform offers automated provisioning and configuration, IT infrastructure tagging, high availability, dynamic storage management and an operating system agnostic approach. Only those enterprises that take a tenacious and consolidated approach will fully realise the benefits of an investment in virtualisation.

Over the next few months and years, the technologies themselves will continue to evolve as companies increase their investment in developing new ways to securely deliver resources to users, and look at new ways to consolidate and centralise systems into the data centre. Any company wishing to remain at the forefront of virtualisation needs to be open-minded, and all-encompassing. They should embrace international insight and input into technologies in order to remain focused on addressing new business challenges as they arise.

The current iteration of virtualisation technologies is paving the way for future advancements in this field. Businesses keen to stay ahead of their competitors are wise to move across to a virtual infrastructure now, in order to reap the immediate benefits and ensure they can continue to efficiently refine and adapt their infrastructure to their changing business needs.