Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Atif Malik, Consulting Director for Data Center & Infrastructure Optimization at SunGard Availability Services

Why Asset Optimization Will Rule in 2013

The coming year will be dominated by data, and organizations with the ability to optimize their data by moving from ad-hoc management to optimized analysis that allows them to improve business processes, identify critical assets and shift toward operational resiliency will gain a competitive advantage.

In every sector, from financial services to retail to healthcare, information is growing in quantities so enormous that most enterprises do not have the infrastructure to analyze that date--the business simply doesn't have the personnel or the technology resources to process the data in any meaningful way. Unstructured data sets residing within an organization have exploded beyond the internal management capabilities, and the enterprises that have so far failed to organize the volumes of information they hold risk losing the ability to control costs and maximize business growth.

In terms of both resiliency and cost assessment, careful asset optimization can mutually align and strengthen both of these business objectives. Fortune 500 companies have for years adopted virtualization strategies, yet many have not critically assessed optimizing their virtualized environment. The continued push in recent years to find savings by virtualizing physical infrastructure has caused enterprises to overlook assessing their virtualized environment for additional cost savings, most commonly in using their virtual farms more efficiently rather than scaling out to add to their virtual assets. Increased density of virtualized environments can be a huge area of cost savings in 2013.

A trend that will gain momentum is enterprises that view IT as a division that deliver not just technology solutions, but business solutions. Enterprises are under greater pressure to drive down costs, and can utilize their IT departments to locate areas of the business where costs can be contained and resiliency gained by eliminating duplicated business processes or inefficiencies in virtualization.

• Virtualization Assessment. IT should build a business case for consolidating virtualized resources, including data centers, servers and other devices using a virtual infrastructure.
• IT Recovery for virtualized platforms. IT should plan for the recovery of both virtualized and physical systems across multiple platforms. As part of this planning, assess the human element: does the enterprise have enough hands to perform an effective recovery test replicating a full-scale recovery, and the ability to manage an entire recovery process end-to-end? The enterprise must be prepared for a hybrid recovery of a wide variety of physical and virtual machines, and must overcome challenges like recreating a multi-layer, multi-platform stack for each mission-critical app, recovering mission-critical apps within the time requirements needed to avoid negative consequences to the RTO, and avoiding huge capital outlays on CapEx for building a secondary recovery site, and on OpEx for maintaining the site.
• Virtualization and the cloud. As an enterprise grows its cloud environment, it should optimize for high availability, automation, and scalability.

IT leaders are increasingly required to focus their attention on investing time and effort toward ensuring constant, high-performance availability of an organization's mission critical applications. This focus encompasses the ability to better prepare for and recover from disruptive events, and protect and sustain high-value services and supporting assets-information, technology, facilities, and people-that are essential to meet business objectives and satisfy budget demands. Moving into 2013, it is exciting to assist customers as they adjust to tapping their data sets to improve their business, build toward resiliency by more tightly integrating their virtualized environment, and gain more value from their IT resources.

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