Virtualization Expert Barb Goldworm

Evolving Solutions Data Center Leaders interview series continues into the new year below in our interview with Barb Goldworm, President and Chief Analyst of FOCUS and author of Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs. Barb has spent over 30 years in the data systems and storage arena has published articles extensively since the 1990’s. Barb is a frequent speaker at industry events and was recently ranked as one of the top 3 knowledge expert speakers at Storage Networking World’s Global Conference Series.

In Evolving Solutions interview with Barb below, strategies including moving towards green IT and implementing server virtualization are discussed as potential avenues pointing towards data center cost avoidance.

Evolving Solutions:
What tips would you offer for business seeking to reduce data center costs?

Barb Goldworm:
There are a number of technology areas today that offer significant value in reducing total cost of ownership, with an excellent return on investment.

At a high level, virtualization across the entire infrastructure can reduce costs, especially on the opex side – reducing space, power, cooling, hardware, maintenance and management costs. Green computing overall also can contribute major cost reductions, due to the reduction in power and cooling costs. Moving to blade systems can also increase your efficiencies in power and cooling, as well as reducing space and decreasing cabling costs. Other specific areas in storage that can allow information growth while getting more out of storage resources would include features such as data deduplication and thin provisioning.

Evolving Solutions:
Are there inherent dangers in trying to make your data center too cost efficient?

Barb Goldworm:
As with anything in IT, there are trade-offs, and finding the balancepoints between efficiency, cost containment and flexibility is a challenge. Likewise in terms of capacity management, finding the balancepoint between underprovisioning and overprovisioning is really the goal.

Evolving Solutions:
Your book, Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs was published in 2007.  In the year since its release, what would you point to as the most major innovation in virtualization?

Barb Goldworm:
The biggest innovation has probably come in the area of I/O virtualization with advances such as HP Virtual Connect and IBM Open Fabric Manager. The other key improvement is that blades have increased in horsepower – cpu, memory and number of NICs/HBAs, making them an even better platform for running virtual servers. There are also now a variety of purpose built blades and chassis for key areas including virtualization and SMB environments.

Evolving Solutions:
Server virtualization has been gaining recognition in the mainstream as a data center cost avoidance solution.  What other products or solutions do you envision reducing data center costs 5 years down the road?

Barb Goldworm:
Desktop and application virtualization are now coming into their own in terms of cost benefits (particularly with some recent and upcoming enhancements) and will be even bigger than server virtualization in the long run.

Mobility advances will also play a key role in changing the way IT works, which will have both costs and benefits, and major productivity advantages. The other longer term change will be the incorporation of cloud computing into the enterprise model, including functions like bursting to the cloud, which can have big cost benefits.

Evolving Solutions:
“Green IT”, like server virtualization, has at its heart reducing data costs, but is becoming a hard sell as many see it only as a “hot topic”.  How would you recommend selling the idea of green IT to upper management?

Barb Goldworm:
Green IT has huge financial benefits, but often the benefits (reduced power and cooling) fall into the facilities budget.
The costs (virtualization and moving to green hardware like blades and other newer green servers and storage) fall in the IT budget.

Success comes when the two organizations work together at the upper management level and see the overall benefit to the corporation. In a way, green IT is a great way to fund the move to a new virtual infrastructure running on new and improved modular hardware.