Turn your Infrastructure into a Virtual Machine

With more VMware points of integration across its entire portfolio than any other vendor, EMC is ideally positioned to assist organisations on their journey to virtualisation and cloud computing.

That’s according to Brian Whitman, Senior VMware Specialist with EMC, who was in South Africa recently.

“For many organisations, infrastructure is a necessary evil,” Whitman says. “From an EMC perspective, our goal is to make it as invisible, easy to use, reliable and scalable as possible. Ideally, people shouldn’t have to think about their infrastructure.

“To achieve this, EMC has invested heavily in being VMware’s biggest and best partner, because that’s where the future is – in virtualisation and cloud computing.”

Whitman helps customers accelerate their VMware efforts through integrated and complementary EMC solutions. With 16 years’ experience in information technology, he has developed a breadth of experience in systems, network, and database administration, as well as application architecture and design, specialising in Microsoft and VMware technologies.

In today’s harsh economy, the majority of organisations devote 75% of their IT budgets to simply ‘keeping the lights on’ and only 25% is allocated to innovation with a view to enhancing business value.

“We are trying to change that by making infrastructures more self-healing, and one way to do that is to integrate tightly with VMware vSphere, the industry-leading virtualisation platform for building cloud infrastructures,” Whitman says.

vSphere accelerates the shift to cloud computing for existing data centres, while simultaneously underpinning compatible public cloud offerings, thereby paving the way for the hybrid cloud model. In essence, it enables organisations to run business-critical applications with confidence and respond to business faster.

Commenting on the uptake of virtualisation in South Africa, Whitman says many companies are close to 100% virtualised, with the average company having completed between 50% and 80% of their virtualisation journey.

“We have found that South African companies adopt technology at about the same rate as in the US,” he says.

“There are a number of new technologies which help organisations optimise the potential of their virtual environments. For example, EMC’s PowerPath software automates, standardises and optimises data paths in physical and virtual environments as well as cloud deployments to deliver tangible performance, management and scalability benefits. It also helps to reduce operational costs.”

In addition, Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI), an EMC-developed plug-in to the VMware vCenter management software, allows the system administrator to provision, monitor and manage the VMware vSphere  storage themselves, greatly simplifying management of the virtual environment.

“All of these tools are critical in reaping the benefits of virtualisation,” Whitman says. “Ideally, users shouldn’t know whether they are accessing physical or traditional systems – they just want to get their work done.”