The year of virtualization
Sure, it lets you do more with less, but it’s not easy. Here’s what you need to know
By Rutrell Yasin
Thinking of moving to a virtualized computing environment? This might be a good year to do it.
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Agencies increasingly are turning to virtualization technology to consolidate servers and data centers to reduce server sprawl, computing costs and power consumption.
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Moreover, agency information technology managers are being forced to meet growing computing demand with less money and staff as more workers retire.
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Virtualization can make a single physical resource, such as a server, operating system or storage device, appear to function as multiple resources. Or, it can make multiple physical resources appear as a single resource.
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Server virtualization, which is the ability to run multiple instances of operating systems concurrently on a single hardware system, is gathering momentum in the government sector.
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To date, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has deployed VMware’s virtualization technology to collapse 30 servers into one, using it as a strategy for disaster recovery, storage backup, standardization and security.
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The Marine Corps also is implementing VMware products for server consolidation with the goal of reducing its physical infrastructure from 300 data centers worldwide — which includes about 12,000 physical servers — to 30 data centers and 100 mobile platforms.
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At the state level, Oregon has successfully completed a multiyear network consolidation of 11 agency data centers into a single facility in an effort to improve service, productivity and energy consumption, state officials say. Another indicator that the technology is a hot ticket is increased activity by vendors such as Cisco Systems, Citrix, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. VMware, a leading provider of virtualization technology, had a breakout year in 2007. And Microsoft is poised to release Windows Server...