IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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A mainstream topic in 2014: Virtualisation
Tue, 15th Apr 2014
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Virtualisation is leading the way to a “perfect storm of network pressures”.

Market trend and reality is fast looming on us with growing consumer demands, mobility and real time application including video has fuelled growth in virtualisation of applications and servers.

With advancement in virtualisation of server technology and adoption by many enterprises now.

We can safely say virtualistion is here to stay and advance to the next level. Virtualisation and distributed applications are transforming every part of data center!

At one point in time, most network traffic flowed between a server in the data center to the desktop (North to south traffic). Now the server to server traffic (east to west) is expected to surpass the server to desktop traffic in the enterprise.

This is also putting enormous pressure on network and data center technology. Current data center networks were never designed to be efficient for server to server traffic.

Virtualisation of application and servers/consolidation is driving the cost down, improving management and overall delivering higher business value leading to growth in enterprises.

What are the benefits of adopting this technology for businesses? (new features for 2014)

Every enterprise mid to large is looking at server consolidation to save costs and become more agile on the business front.

The changing economy and increased market competition from players is driving the adoption of new technology (virtualistion of server and applications).

New usage for real time applications, smart phones, tablets, increased Video usage within enterprise and social media usage all add to the adoption.

Data Center modernisation is pushing the adoption as well. Cloud services are ramping up, and paving the way for virtualistion adoption more and more.

What are ANZ customers looking for in virtualistion?

Consolidation of servers, applications and simplicity in management have been at the top of mind for IT managers.

Where does Alcatel-Lucent see virtualisation heading?

The biggest impact of virtualisation is in cloud services and data center design / technology. With growing multimedia applications, virtualisation and social media, there is a huge impact on server to server traffic, distribution of load and low latency.

We feel the next would be virtualisation of networks and SDN technology with leading hypervisor management/open API’s for integration.

Our breakthrough starts with a unique blueprint for application fluent data center switching. This blueprint brings together three core innovations that together enable extremely scalable, high performance and resilient data center fabric.

We have what we call vNP-Virtual Network Profile that enables applications to be managed as services, letting the network fluently understand and dynamically control what is needed for quality application delivery, including automating virtual machine movement.