John Foster, Senior Director, Systems Product Management – JAPAC, Oracle Corporation
By John Foster, Senior Director, Systems Product Management – JAPAC, Oracle Corporation
Over the past few years, virtualization adoption has been growing tremendously especially in data centers. Today, it is no longer regarded as an isolated technology to consolidate systems and reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX). Based on our recent customer discussions, virtualization has evolved into a strategic IT deployment to facilitate scalability and speed to support enterprise applications’ workloads and deliver applications on demand.
Virtualization is more prominent now especially as Cloud computing is gaining momentum in Philippines. Essentially, customers intend to adopt virtualization solutions to fulfil their changing business requirements and better support enterprise mobility (with the emergence of smart communication devices) while reducing the management costs.
Key advantages of adopting converged infrastructure system for virtualization
Managing a virtual environment with separate systems and applications running inside can be challenging. Thus the converged infrastructure solution is a turnkey for virtualization adoption as it integrates compute, network, and storage resources in a software-defined fabric that enables efficient data center deployments. This leads to faster time to be application-ready.
A converged infrastructure system helps reduce the complexity of system migrations (from physical to virtual environments) to lower business risks and improve business agility. It also creates the underpinning fundamentals for future Cloud-based deployments. With it, business organizations can focus on addressing strategic business needs rather than investing considerable time to hand-configure hardware infrastructure from scratch.
In fact, Oracle is the only vendor in the marketplace today that offers converged infrastructure system with combined management capabilities that span applications, plus a supporting infrastructure for physical, virtual, and private cloud computing environments.
Converged infrastructure system for virtualization such as the Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is an integrated, “wire once” software-defined infrastructure system designed for rapid deployments of both infrastructure hardware and application software.
Application-driven virtualization
One of the largest benefits of systems’ virtualization is that enterprise applications can also be consolidated. Therefore, it is crucial that organizations include enterprise applications’ deployments as part of their virtualization strategy in the initial stage. In other words, virtualization must be application-driven.
Getting applications ready for users require a lot more than just hardware provisioning. Virtualization can reduce the time required for application production. For instance, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is engineered to accelerate deployment of the full, hardware-to-applications stack for business organizations to get the applications to users within hours, rather than days.
In addition, it offers the ability to be able to quickly deploy applications to a highly scalable virtualized environment – Enabling data centers to meet SLAs and reduces businesses’ time to market. IT users can also rapidly deploy test, development, and staging environments with lower costs involved.
Concertedly, virtualization can transform the application deployment, physical and virtual systems’ management to enable data centers and business organizations gain better application performance and reliability.
Virtualization as a step to Cloud strategy for Philippine business organizations
Local organizations strive to realize the highest business value possible from their existing investments in IT infrastructure and software. Virtualization is the ‘scalable foundation’ for migration onto Cloud, and also an integrated step that enables IT consolidations to maximize existing technology investments into data centers.
Based on our observation, Philippines’ Cloud adoption momentum is growing, hence IT services such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are in great demand to support the increasing usage of Cloud applications. Therefore, accordingly, virtualization adoption fits in to enable this new service-based chapter in Philippines.
Apart from these, as a step towards Cloud, virtualization allows applications in the Cloud to connect to any other application accessible over the data center’s networks. This will serve to enhance organizations’ customer experience strategy as more and more of them are deploying SaaS-based CRM applications.
