As organisations in both the Public and Private sector struggle to make their IT infrastructures less of an inhibitor of change and more of a vehicle capable of adapting to constantly-changing demand, so the concept of virtualisation has gained significant interest and momentum. In effect, IT Infrastructure Virtualisation creates the conditions needed to support the flexible use of IT resources in pursuit of the organisation’s strategic intent. This, however, is not purely a technical challenge, but requires an organisational change from the business unit concept of self-autonomy towards a pooled resource model across the entire organisation.

This shift in how IT resources are deployed and consumed within the organisation requires the structure to be transparent so that management can be performed based on corporate priorities, and the cost and value of these priorities can be clearly seen. Effectively, IT is being moved from a business unit-funded project structure, (where the head of department bids for, and provides, the initial capital for the IT project with the on-going maintenance expense being funded from a central, corporate budget), towards a mixed, payas-you-go model, where the corporate budget funds the capital costs associated with providing the underlying infrastructure, and the business units are charged for the services they consume and pay for the deployment of any new services required.

• Butler Group considers that the transformation of organisations from siloed business units towards a virtual business process-driven architecture is supported by the adoption of Infrastructure Virtualisation.
• Server consolidation alone can yield a saving of UK£2M over three years for an organisation currently running 250 dual-core servers.
• Power saving in the order of UK£78K per 1000 PCs per year can be realised by moving from a full desktop PCs infrastructure, to a server-hosted desktop virtualisation solution.
• Moving from physical to virtual might appear to be straight forward on paper or in the lab environment, but the migration of production systems into a virtual environment presents a very real set of challenges.
• Storage virtualisation helps organisations to manage their storage resources more efficiently in order to achieve higher utilisation rates.
• The new server-hosted Virtualised Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offers most of the benefits of a traditional PC but with the added benefit of greatly-reduced management costs.
• Butler Group estimates that on average, organisations can save UK£4K per 1000 help desk calls per month through the promotion of user self-service and a reduction in application-related help desk calls.
• IT managers and enterprise architects must understand and appreciate the key elements and concepts of network virtualisation if they are to run successful IT virtualisation projects.
• Butler Group believes that even greater benefit can be obtained through the strategic adoption of virtualisation in the data centre, and that infrastructure running cost-reductions in the order of 40-60% are certainly attainable in many cases.
• As with any maturing market, Butler Group expects to see a great deal of consolidation and close partnering over the coming months as vendors seek to offer organisations compelling and proven solutions sets. Open source products and bundled offerings will inevitably have an impact on some quarters, but today’s market leaders look solid for the foreseeable future.
• The arguments for IT virtualisation are compelling, especially in large data centres; and so Butler Group believes that virtualisation will undoubtedly become the norm over the next two to three years.
• Software licensing and vendor support models have yet to catch up with the IT virtualisation market, and so early adopters are struggling to operate fully-compliant IT environments.

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