The Many Advantages of IBM Virtualization All Start With a Single Concept: Simplicity

Every day, businesses of all sizes make the decision to implement virtualization in their IT infrastructures after careful analysis has led them to conclude that it will optimize their Return on Investment (ROI) in technology. But why do so many businesses choose to work with IBM for virtualization?

There are as many reasons as there are customers. Yet, if you analyze what IBM customers say, you'll unravel some common threads that explain why IBM is the trusted partner of choice when companies choose to virtualize their IT infrastructures.

First, there is the flexibility and choice that comes with IBM Virtualization. No other company offers such a wide breadth of environments that can be virtualized. Whether your IT environment is mainframe, Unix, Microsoft Windows, or Sun Solaris, IBM has the expertise to implement virtualization painlessly, without disrupting ongoing workloads and without requiring you to "rip out" your existing system.

"Whether your IT environment is mainframe, Unix, Microsoft Windows, or Sun Solaris, IBM has the expertise to implement virtualization painlessly without disrupting ongoing workloads and without requiring you to "rip out" your existing system."

Unmatched Flexibility, Continued Support, and User-Friendly Tools
It is a similar story with storage, where IBM again offers unparalleled flexibility for customers. IBM's Storage Area Network (SAN) Volume Controller works with all storage systems, including those of IBM's competitors. The SAN Volume Controller puts a layer on top of your storage that abstracts the physical devices from workload requests. With IBM SAN Volume Controller, the availability of applications can be maintained even if storage is taken down for routine maintenance or suffers an unscheduled outage. Moreover, the SAN Volume Controller can also be used to migrate storage when new applications are being installed.

Introduced three years ago, IBM SAN Volume Controller has been adopted by more than 2,500 customers, some of whom have seen payback periods of as short as one week.

Support provides another reason why companies turn to IBM for their virtualization needs. IBM stands by its customers after they have embarked on their virtualization journey to make sure they achieve their virtualization objectives. On occasion, some customers stall out in the virtualization process after reaping some of the low-hanging fruits of the process. These customers typically have consolidated the physical resources, saving dollars through simplification but then neglect active management of their virtual environment.

Rather than simplifying the physical IT environment only to see complexity proliferate with virtual devices, IBM offers the simplest, most effective tools for managing the physical and virtual environments together. Consider the IBM Systems Director family. IBM Director is a tool for systems platform management across IBM systems. All customers who purchase IBM servers are entitled to base IBM Director, whether it is delivered with the system, or available for download. With the base IBM Director, businesses can view and track the hardware configuration of remote systems in detail and monitor the usage and performance of critical components, such as processors, disks, and memory. Extensions to IBM Director to enhance the base function are also available. One popular extension is IBM Virtualization Manager, which helps customers configure and manage their virtual environments. This tool maps physical to logical and integrates with popular virtualization technologies such as VMware and select Xen hypervisors.

The simplicity of IBM Director stems from the fact that it offers a common set of tooling across the virtualized environment while offering the unique tools that are tailored to each particular platform. This common interface makes it easy for IT managers to monitor system performance easily and to switch back-and-forth seamlessly between platforms without interrupting workflows.

Another component of the IBM Systems Director family,  enables you to monitor and manage resources delivering service based on business policy to workloads across the enterprise. These workloads may run in an individual server, or span multiple systems. No competing virtualization management tool can claim to support the z/OS, AIX®, i5/OS™, Microsoft® Windows®, and Sun Solaris platforms as managed servers as IBM does. Moreover, Enterprise Workload Manager works with multi-tiered applications, such as data mining, Web banking, e-mail, B2B inventory management, and servers.

Innovation = Efficiency
A further advantage of IBM virtualization is that IBM thinks outside the box in a quite literal sense when it comes to computing efficiency. Not only does IBM virtualization increase processor utilization, but IBM PowerExecutive, available on all x86 servers, economizes on usage of electricity. As every data center administrator will tell you, power costs are skyrocketing. A study released by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (link resides outside of ibm.com) in February, 2007 found that U.S. data centers consumed 45 billion kilowatt hours of power in 2005, twice as much power as they consumed only five years earlier. The utility bill for all that processing and cooling power was $2.7 billion, a tempting target in the never-ending search to reduce overhead.

One way in which IBM is reducing electricity consumption is through its PowerExecutive, an intelligent software solution that enables clients to use power for processing workloads and not for devices that are merely standing by. PowerExecutive keeps track of activity and allows clients to shut off power usage when processors are not in use. If, for instance, BladeCenter has eight blades in use and six blades idle, PowerExecutive reduces power to those six blades until they are needed again. In such situations, the most efficient server can be no server at all.

IBM: Always at the Forefront, Always at Your Service
Typically, all of these product-specific advantages factor into the decision to entrust IBM with your virtualization mandate. As compelling as these advantages of IBM virtualization are, there exist, in fact, more fundamental reasons to choose IBM as your virtualization partner. The first is IBM's long-standing commitment to open standards, a commitment that is much more than lip-service. IBM is always looking to see how it can make IBM solutions work better with other technologies, including operating systems, applications, and devices. So while we are always looking for ways to integrate IBM products more tightly, we are also working to integrate with the rest of the IT world. This gives IBM customers peace of mind in knowing that their system can always be riding the crest of the technology wave, not languishing in the backwaters of technology.

The other fundamental reason for choosing IBM is the fact that no one else offers IBM's depth and breadth of experience in virtualization. At first blush, it might seem that virtualization is adding to complexity, not reducing it, and that this added complexity might degrade system performance. In practice, this is certainly not the case. Many IBM clients have actually seen their system performance improve. Results like this can only come from years of experience serving companies and their virtualization needs. Forty years ago, IBM introduced virtualization to the mainframe environment. Today, IBM is leading the way with virtualization for PC and x86 server environments. With a track record like that, there is no better partner than IBM.