Avoiding the Hazards of IT Consolidation
Virtualisation and datacentre consolidation are two of the strongest trends in information technology today. Server sprawl is being significantly curtailed as organisations use virtualisation technologies from Microsoft, Citrix, VMware and others to allow applications to peacefully coexist on the same machine. As organisations master each phase of virtualisation, they gain confidence to move onto the next. Consolidation within the corporate datacentre leads to further consolidation of servers that used to be distributed to each branch office location. Virtualisation success in server infrastructure leads to wider application of virtual desktop infrastructure technologies.
The benefits of these technology strategies are clear, and often dramatic. That does not mean they are without risk, however. Without proper planning, organisations that rush ahead with IT transformation dreams can see them turn into user experience and support nightmares.
As IT budgets thaw slightly with the warming of the economy, many of the areas where companies are most likely to be making investments involve virtualisation, consolidation, and the replication of virtualised systems for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. In a January 2010 survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 33 percent of organisations said they planned to invest in more virtualisation, 27 percent cited network upgrades as a top priority, and 23 percent said datacentre consolidation was at the top of their list. Business continuity / disaster recovery ranked high for another 21 percent, and 18 percent were ready to invest in desktop virtualisation. One big reason network upgrades are on that list is that each of the other priorities makes the overall performance of enterprise systems more dependent than ever on network performance and reliability.
Understanding this is particularly critical when consolidation means asking more and more employees to use applications they will access over a wide area network (WAN) connection, rather than from a local server. The company as a whole may benefit from moving branch office servers into the corporate data centre, but branch office workers won’t thank you for it if the applications they rely on for their daily work become unusable as a result.
In technology as in romance, you only get once chance to make a good impression. If you shoot yourself in the foot by presenting employees with a new and improved system that turns out to be worse than what you had before, they will be slow to trust you again.
