CBC, Sun backs virtualisation for improved enterprise productivity

CBC, Sun backs virtualisation for improved enterprise productivity
Ben Uzor Jr
Prevailing global economic conditions has continued to poses a significant challenge for businesses in Nigeria. However, Information Technology (IT) departments must keep service levels high while reducing costs; get more out of the same or fewer resources as well as take on environmental issues. Virtualisation, one of those technologies coming at the appropriate time could be applied to servers, storage and desktops. It can release assets, saving in capital, operational expenditure as well as reduce the number of software licences that need to be deployed. Rheinhardt Esau, volume product specialist, SSA, Sun Microsystems Incorporated made these remarks at the seminar with specific focus on Virtualisation organised by the CBC Group in Lagos recently. He stated: “By abstracting the software away from the underlying hardware, a world of new usage models opens up that reduce costs, increase administration efficiency, strengthen security, while making your computing infrastructure more resilient in the event of a disaster.”
Esau pointed out that datacentre efficiency and enterprise agility are more important now than ever even with the present economic climate and virtualisation has become essential to meeting these needs. “You will find the most complete set of virtualisation offerings available at Sun. Our open, standards-based and third-party partner-friendly virtualisation solutions can deliver vast improvements and deep savings throughout the enterprise.”
He added: “Sun has designed a virtual desktop infrastructure in which IT organisations can choose to mix/match vendor offerings to meet the unique needs of a wide range of IT organisations. This openness makes Sun's architecture particularly compelling for those organisations that want to be able to choose best-of-breed providers, diversify the risk associated with vendor lock-in, or leverage existing legacy non-Sun equipment.”
Esau further explained that Sun plays actively in the desktop virtualisation space.
“Desktop virtualisation is revolutionizing interactive environments by moving processing off individual physical desktop systems and onto centralized datacenter servers. Users access desktop applications through a range of clients. By locating the applications and even the operating environment itself on a single server within the datacenter, IT staff can streamline system administration, secure and back up valuable corporate data, and provide the workforce with mobile commuting options”, he noted. In the same vein, Olufemi Babajide, market development manager, Intel Nigeria who spoke at the seminar observed that the organic growth of organisation means that their datacenter would become unyielding. “They would need to watch power, space which would become a huge challenge. The first thing is to increase your utilisation and because your business is growing you need more up-time to improve on service delivery.”
He further added: “At Intel, we focus on performance per core. With consolidation and virtualisation you can make a lot of cost savings for your company. The important thing about infrastructure is primarily about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).”
Babajide explained that to increase manageability, security and flexibility in IT environments, virtualisation can provide maximum system utilisation by consolidating multiple environment into a single server or Personal Computer (PC). “Intel believes that whatever you do with your technology the processor is key. For Intel Xeon 5500 series processor, it has the Intel turbo boost technology which increases performance and ensures maximum utilisation by increasing the processors frequency.”