Given the constant focus on virtualisation as a ‘green’ technology, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s manna from heaven for IT execs desperate to reduce power consumption and carbon emissions.
While the technology undoubtedly boasts strong green credentials, this increasingly is detracting from the real bottom line business benefits: making financial organisations more nimble, more productive, and gaining competitive advantage whilst bringing down costs.
The concept of virtualisation is, of course, nothing new: before the words “sever virtualisation and “storage virtualisation” were grouped together, it had been driving efficiency within the IT departments of financial organisations for many years.
The first mainframe and Mini computing environments of the 70s and early 80s were a totally virtualised structure, with lots of programmes operating on different areas of one system.
To run additional programmes, additional memory and storage were added, and the test environment would run on that same system, therefore replicating the production environment 100%. In essence, not a million miles from the current virtualised environment.
Back in these early days of enterprise computing, environmental concern had barely entered the public consciousness, and was certainly more likely to be associated with Greenpeace than IT departments.
While the technology undoubtedly boasts strong green credentials, this increasingly is detracting from the real bottom line business benefits: making financial organisations more nimble, more productive, and gaining competitive advantage whilst bringing down costs.
The concept of virtualisation is, of course, nothing new: before the words “sever virtualisation and “storage virtualisation” were grouped together, it had been driving efficiency within the IT departments of financial organisations for many years.
The first mainframe and Mini computing environments of the 70s and early 80s were a totally virtualised structure, with lots of programmes operating on different areas of one system.
To run additional programmes, additional memory and storage were added, and the test environment would run on that same system, therefore replicating the production environment 100%. In essence, not a million miles from the current virtualised environment.
Back in these early days of enterprise computing, environmental concern had barely entered the public consciousness, and was certainly more likely to be associated with Greenpeace than IT departments.
