Increased competition. Escalating costs. Mergers and acquisitions. Poorly utilized information technology. These pressures are forcing companies like yours to transform data centers into next-generation facilities that can better support business growth and speed innovation. Yet as you undertake this transformation, you may be faced with physical and technology constraints, power and cooling capacity issues, and outdated legacy infrastructures.

As a key element of a next-generation data center and an enabling technology for data center transformation, virtualization can help streamline the delivery of new services and deploy resources quickly to address changing business requirements. Here’s how.

Consolidation – Consolidation focuses on simplifying, standardizing and reducing the number of data centers you have. It does the same to the infrastructure within those data centers. Virtualization can help reduce resource sprawl and lower the amount of physical space required to house your infrastructure. As your demand for resources increases, your IT organization can easily add capacity rapidly – without breaking your budget.

Business Continuity & Availability – You can’t afford disruptions to your business operations. Virtualization can help reduce planned downtime and radically cuts the time to recover from unplanned downtime. Virtualization assists you in getting back to business after a disaster by reducing recovery times from days to hours or minutes.

Energy & Space Efficiency – The costs associated with energy use and space requirements can affect your company’s bottom line. Virtualization addresses both of these concerns head on. Since a virtualized data center contains less hardware, you can reduce the costs associated with powering and cooling the equipment in your data center environment and make better use of your current facilities. In addition, integrated management software used in virtualized technologies helps your business improve resource utilization and optimize workloads to lessen energy use. In combination with consolidation, virtualization also helps you remove energy- or space-related barriers to growth.

Automation – Companies like yours automate their operational processes to reduce staffing costs, lower the risk of human error and keep their business services up and running. Virtualization supports automation activities by simplifying your infrastructure and instilling a high level of standardization across your entire data center environment – both of which are key to successful automation initiatives. At the same time, your IT organization can reduce maintenance costs and improve productivity by using IT service management tools and processes to manage your virtualized environments.

Whether you choose to use virtualization to consolidate your infrastructure, improve automation, better protect your applications or increase energy efficiency, there are three key steps that should be followed for a successful implementation.

• Define your data center strategy so it aligns with your business needs and strategy. Understand how virtualization fits into your strategy. To do this, you must look at your business objectives and plans from an IT services perspective. Then clearly define a level of next-generation data center maturity appropriate to your strategies and goals.
• Perform an honest and in-depth assessment of your current data center capabilities and how virtualization technologies can take advantage of them. Include your infrastructure, your IT service management tools and processes, applications and any ITIL procedures and processes that you use.
• Determine the most important projects that must be undertaken and the order in which they should be tackled to gain the most benefit. For example, investing in application modernization will multiply the savings from your virtualization initiatives. In addition to infrastructure initiatives to build-out a next-generation data center, you may also benefit from application modernization and infrastructure management initiatives.

FIMBank Group, a global provider of trade-related financial services, has achieved significant improvements in its data center through virtualization, as well as a 300 percent return on investment.

Established in 1994, FIMBank has steadily grown its trade finance operations, now spanning four continents. With growth came the realization that the company’s existing technology environment could no longer support the increased business demands. FIMBank decided it needed a more compact, energy-efficient and flexible infrastructure.

It chose to consolidate its infrastructure, optimize its data storage and physical space through virtualization, and automate many of its manual processes. FIMBank turned to an HP data center transformation solution featuring HP BladeSystem servers, HP StorageWorks EVA storage and VMware software.

With this solution, FIMBank has achieved substantial economic gains through reduced energy and cooling consumption. This is due in part to the reduction in the number of physical servers, as well as the better energy efficiency of blade technology. Virtualization has also enabled the organization to respond more efficiently to changing business demands. The use of VMware with HP BladeSystem servers allows the FIMBank team to build and deploy servers 19 times faster than before.

By using virtualization technology as part of data center transformation, your company can improve the agility and flexibility of your data center infrastructure. This in turn can help you reduce the costs of doing business, eliminate server sprawl and streamline the deployment of new or enhanced business services.