How to Use Virtualization to Save Money and Improve Service Quality
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Just when you think you've trimmed any semblance of fat remaining in your IT budget, an economic downturn comes along, requiring you to find new ways to further reduce spending. You can target some of the usual suspects such as travel and training or, as Knowledge Center contributor Mark Settle explains here, you can explore virtualization as a means of achieving significant IT cost savings while also improving productivity and quality of service.
Our
IT organization began its virtualization and automation journey with a
limited number of key objectives. We wanted to obtain the maximum
return on existing investments in server and storage resources and
become more responsive to the needs of our software developers. We were
pleasantly surprised to discover significant side benefits that far
exceeded the objectives of our original plan. These side benefits
included labor savings within the IT organization and productivity
gains within our R&D teams.
Automation procedures that were implemented as part of our virtualization initiative dramatically improved our ability to respond to developer requests for data center resources. The speed and predictability of our response times, in turn, has made the developers less possessive of "their" assets and more willing to return underutilized resources to the virtual pool for reuse by others. Developers have become increasingly confident in our ability to satisfy their needs on a just-in-time (JIT) basis.
Although it's difficult to precisely estimate the time savings for developers through the new provisioning process, lead times for individual requests have been reduced by at least 10 to 15 workdays. This is equivalent to a collective reduction in lead times of 360 work months per quarter for a 1,500-person development organization operating in five distinct locations.
