Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Aaron Rallo, Chief Executive Officer of TSO Logic
The True Cost of VMs Will Be Revealed!
In
2016, VMs will no longer be free (not that they ever were).
Because virtual computing
power is so easy to deploy, there's been a tendency to believe that virtual
machines are free. They're not and they never were. In 2016, we'll see greater
scrutiny of the real costs of running virtual machines, as well as greater
attention paid to any inefficiencies surrounding application delivery and the
utilization of IT resources. Here are four related issues to keep an eye on in
the upcoming year:
1)
People will become aware that VMs cost more than they once thought - Traditionally, the prevailing mindset was that virtual
machines had no costly baggage, and therefore, there was no need to account for
them. But with economic pressure to cut operating expenses and eliminate waste coming
down from the C-Level, a strict accounting is overdue. The reality is, VMs do
indeed have real costs - they consume space on hosts, gobble up storage, and
can incur hefty licensing fees. Plus, they have to be maintained by IT
staffers, which diverts costly resources from more value-added initiatives. And
our experience shows that 30 percent of virtual servers are not being used at
all, which makes finding and eliminating them a great way to cut costs in the
data center.
2) Greater efforts will be made
to discover the true cost of delivering applications - Application delivery is, arguably, the single largest
data center expense that executives know the least about. It's a "mystery" that
stems from a lack of insight and controls. With the right tools, IT can take
control of workload provisioning to bypass inefficiencies and bring down the
cost. For instance, in many data centers, workloads are often distributed
across older, less efficient servers. Having the ability to reallocate
resources on the fly and reduce the underutilization of efficient servers gives
you the ability to drive down costs. Knowing the the true cost of delivering applications presents an
opportunity to make your business a more profitable one.
3) Your boss will want to know how
much it costs to move to the cloud - If your company is not there already, get ready. For organizations considering
a move to the cloud or a hybrid environment, it is becoming increasingly
important to know the technical and financial implications. You'll need to
gather good intel to ensure your investment is cost-effective and can be continuously
optimized.
4) Security teams will crack
down on unused compute - Every
server, used or not, is a potential point of entry that needs to be secured. So
eliminating
server sprawl means fewer machines to protect. Since as much as 30 percent of
servers in a typical data center are not doing anything at all, watch for the
security folks to come looking for the low-hanging, security-risk fruit and
take physical and virtual zombie servers offline.
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About the Author
Aaron Rallo is chief
executive officer of TSO Logic, a privately held company that delivers a
software platform to integrate the essential components for optimizing IT
operations in any data center environment - from legacy, to virtual, and
complex cloud environments.