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MANAGEMENT: ADVICE ■
IT departments have become service providers. As Reality check
service providers it is normal to ask customers what A recent survey by IDC described the adoption of
they want, when they would like it, agree their virtualisation as “explosive”. The analyst firm esti-
request is reasonable and then deliver the service to mates that some 52pc of servers bought in 2008 will be
their satisfaction. This is far removed from the days virtualised and that 54pc of those which are not yet
when IT said that you can have X and it’ll take Y days using virtualisation will do so in the next 18 months.
to do it. But what is life like for those that have not yet made
So now the pressure is on. Internal customer expec- the decision to virtualise? Some or all of these charac-
tations are high and IT resources have remained static teristics may apply:
or decreased. When it comes to a business interrup- • There are too many servers for the IT staff to recover
tion, the internal – and external – customer expects in 24 hours
solutions within hours, not days. It used to be the • Different individuals look after different systems and
norm to plan to have some systems back in the first inconsistencies in server configuration are common
24 hours, more after 48 hours and the rest after five • Backups are done once a day, so in the event that a
days. Now, the expectation is that everything should system needs to be recovered, the recovery point
be back within eight and 24 hours. Is this achievable objective (RPO) is the previous day’s backup
at a reasonable cost? This article explores how adopt- • The computer room is getting full and/or the air
ing a virtualisation strategy is enabling faster recov- conditioning system is working at near full capacity
ery times and what impact its implementation might • The business impact analysis determined which
have on an organisation. applications and processes are the most critical. This
September 2008 Knowledge Ireland 67
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