Virtual Dynamic Datacenter – Business Aligned Approach

analysis
Aug 20, 20082 mins

A recent article titled "How to create a business-boosting virtualization plan" serves as an excellent strategy model for creating a business driven dynamic virtual datacenter. The synopsis A business-driven virtual datacenter strategy would change any datacenter and infrastructure discussion from a cost-centric mindset to a strategic partnership endeavor. In essence, the conversation would revolve around the fo

A recent article titled “How to create a business-boosting virtualization plan” serves as an excellent strategy model for creating a business driven dynamic virtual datacenter.

The synopsis

A business-driven virtual datacenter strategy would change any datacenter and infrastructure discussion from a cost-centric mindset to a strategic partnership endeavor. In essence, the conversation would revolve around the following tenants:

• What drives revenue, risk and cost?

• Understand what the Quality of Experience (QoE) will be for clients and executives? How to you balance performance, cost, and efficiency?

• What are the key business drivers and pain points that the business experiences?

• What are the most significant business transactions and what is the impact of servicing them properly?

• How to define a measure of key performance indicators and critical success factors that can be used as metrics for goal and investment tracking?

These tenants provide the foundation for a business-driven virtual, dynamic datacenter strategy because a viable virtualization strategy requires rigor as well as an initial investment. That rigor must include business analysis and an engaging architecture practice. Data virtualization is an excellent business driver, because many organizations are still account driven and not customer-centric as they know they should be.

The key lessons learned when building a business-driven virtualization strategy is that you must focus on how you are going to model and measure demand so that supply can be dynamically provisioned. The modeling exercise forces you to explore the many types of behavioral application patterns that a virtualization strategy must address. This includes numerical calculators, messaging systems, transaction systems, portals, and transformation engines, to name a few. These behavioral patterns provide operational requirement templates for applications that help stakeholders decide what kinds of resources they will need for a virtualized platform.

The key obstacles to achieving this strategy are not technical, but are individual and organizational behavior patterns, such as control, trust, responsibility, information sharing, proper documentation, and disciplined development practices.

An engaging architecture practice is critical to driving a business-driven virtual datacenter because it will act as the bridge between all stakeholders (business, development, and operations), eliciting the characteristics of business demand and translating that into the implications for infrastructure change.