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Got Your Sneakers Ready? Time to Take the Leap from Virtualization to Cloud

Simply put, virtualization is insufficient. And, if you have not already determined that yet, it is most likely because you have not yet made the jump to cloud – a technology that meets you at the gate with a multitude of benefits.

“It is only a step on the path; it can save money but it doesn’t solve the overall problems that cloud solves,” Chad Harrington, vice president of Adaptive Computing, explained during a recent company webinar.

“Virtualization gets you farther than not using virtualization but Moab cloud suite [Adaptive’s offering] and private cloud can get you much, much farther than that in terms of efficiency, saving money and especially in terms of saving time,” he added.

The topic of cloud and virtualization is a hot one indeed, as IT managers feverishly search for ways to cut corners while still managing to increase efficiencies and enhance offerings. But what some IT managers are failing to realize is that while virtualization has provided significant efficiency and utilization benefits to IT organizations over the last few years, the new private cloud computing model offers organizations a stronger path – one in which managers can build upon their virtualization investments and maximize service agility, cost savings, and service performance.

Basically, virtualization is not enough anymore, as evidenced by the limitations it imposes.

To begin, virtualization doesn’t afford managers with self service options which means that all processes have to be manually completed which can end up being a huge time suck. Further, virtualization results in VM sprawl, or lots of hypervisors being minimally utilized. With virtualization, managers end up wasting hardware because many servers are underutilized or forgotten about because the cloud is not there to automatically consolidate them.

Finally, when you deal with virtualization without the notion of cloud around it, you deal with a very localized view which results in limited sharing and sharing within a single machine. As put by Harrington, the more siloed your environment is, the less efficient it will be.

So why make the jump from virtualization to cloud? Because of the countless benefits it affords.

Specifically, a cloud environment allows managers to save two to 10 times on hardware, two to 10 times on staff costs, and to deploy services 10 to 100 times faster.

“These are really big numbers especially when you consider that the environments that we run in,” Harrington said. “It comes down to saving money and saving time.”

One company that stands ready to help you make that big leap from virtualization to cloud is Adaptive Computing, a provider of private cloud management solutions. Adaptive Computing’s Moab Cloud Suite is an intelligent cloud management end-to-end platform that provides touchless cloud service optimization across the full cloud service life cycle including agility, cost savings and service performance, according to company officials.

According to Adaptive Computing, the challenges that the company frequently hears about are surrounding speed, service delivery, costs, instability and flexibility. That’s where Moab can come in.

“We believe the solution to these challenges is the Moab Cloud Suite and cloud computing in general as embodied in Moab Cloud Suite,” Harrington said. “… Moab focuses on the private cloud and things that are like private cloud. We don’t power Amazon-type clouds. We power clouds in your environment. We allow you to have the benefits in your environment of an Amazon-type cloud – and actually much better then what Amazon can offer – but within the cost structure of your environment, being able to leverage the investments that you have already made in the hardware that you own.”

“Cloud computing allows you to deliver elastic services to your users while saving money in the process,” he added.

For more on this topic, download an archived version of Adaptive Computing’s popular “Making the Jump from Virtualization to Cloud” webinar.

Edited by Rachel Ramsey

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