If you can see a light at the end of the tunnel right now, it probably looks a lot like an oncoming train. While the recession created a pent-up demand for new applications and a big backlog of needed technology refreshes, it did nothing to fatten IT budgets.
Which leaves you with a big problem: how do you satisfy your customers’ need for change with the staff and budget you have?
Reaping the OPEX advantages of virtualization
Imagine what you could do if it were possible for a single, mid-level IT professional with general skills to manage the equivalent of a mid-sized data center—1,000 virtual machines, a 10-gigabit network, and 40 terabytes of storage.
This kind of super efficiency is actually a lot closer to becoming reality than you might think. The potential OPEX efficiencies of virtualization are huge—much more compelling, in fact, than the CAPEX cost savings everyone understands. Yet very few organizations are reaping any significant OPEX savings from virtualization today beyond simple provisioning. Equally important, very few have the processes, procedures, and tools in place to manage their increasingly dense, virtual, and converged infrastructures.
The solution to both these challenges, I believe, is to change the management paradigm—from the operation of infrastructure to the orchestration of people, processes, and technology.
The end of the tunnel?
In many ways, managing a large-scale virtual environment has more in common with conducting a successful orchestra performance than with our traditional infrastructure management practices.
Rather than dividing up the work and performing largely physical management tasks in separate, specialized infrastructure towers, organizations need a way to build workflows that bring the right virtual elements together, in the right way and at the right time, to achieve a specific result.
Orchestration is a methodology for doing that. By bringing together the right policies, people, processes, and technologies in the right workflow to resolve an event or satisfy a request, orchestration makes it possible for one professional to manage what it usually takes multiple staff to handle.
The good news is that the methodologies, tools, and services needed to achieve orchestration are already available. It’s important to remember, however, that orchestration is much more than automation or a package of new management software. But more on that—and other cloud misconceptions—later.
To learn more about orchestration, and to see how an orchestrated firmware upgrade on a switch compares with the conventional approach, check out my white paper, “Orchestration: A New Model for Operational Efficiency in a Virtual Environment”.
