CA announces results of virtualization study

CA has announced the results of a virtualization study that it had commissioned in November 2009 and was conducted by Forrester Consulting on its behalf. In the results, CA says automation, comprehensive domain coverage, and top-down application-centric management are critical to virtualized IT environs, and new management and automation tools are needed to manage the benefits and risks of virtualization.

The study examines the impact, challenges, and requirements of operating virtualized IT environments. It found that the continued expansion of virtualization introduces new levels of complexity that threaten the quality, reliability and security of services, and as day-to-day production responsibility shifts from subject matter experts to operational generalists, new management and automation tools are needed to minimize the risks.

Roger Pilc, corporate senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Service Automation, CA says the study reflects CA's belief "that management is the key to unlocking the business value of virtualization." "Comprehensive, enterprise-class management and automation can increase IT agility, reduce costs, improve service quality, and reduce risks in physical, virtual and cloud computing environments," he said.

Key findings from the survey of 257 virtualization decision-makers in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan include:

• Moving to internal clouds requires changes to processes and automation management: Many organizations see cloud computing as the logical outgrowth of virtualization. Twenty-eight percent of respondents plan to evolve from virtualization to private cloud computing services for some production workload in the next six months. To attain this goal, the common model of IT service development and operations must be replaced. Process discipline, automation and self-service management tools, and organizational changes are inevitable.
• Comprehensive domain coverage is critical: High among enterprise users' requirements is the ability for management tools to seamlessly and comprehensively manage components of the overall virtualized service that are adjacent to the virtual server, including physical systems, network, and storage. Virtualization blurs the lines between domain silos, making seamless management critical.
• A top-down, application-centric approach is needed: Business requirements revolve around the applications, not the infrastructure. Application analysis is near the top of desired features for virtualization management.
• Capacity management is the top operational concern: Capacity planning and management are mysteries in a virtualized environment because the exact capacity of the infrastructure is hidden beneath the complexity of the virtualized systems. This causes confusion around managing the performance of the infrastructure, which imposes excessive risk to business services reliant upon virtual servers. The issues are more pronounced than models based on physical servers. Users need improved processes and tools to gain the necessary visibility into capacity and infrastructure performance.
• SaaS and cloud-based offerings are highly desired: The trend toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a packaging and delivery option for management software is gaining momentum. The future evolution of this trend is to offer management in a more dynamic cloud offering. Eighty-nine percent of respondents place management-as-a-service as one of the top three most important components a virtualization management product/service should offer.
• Operational control is slowly moving away from SMEs: As any new technology graduates from the testing phase into production, the relevant subject matter experts should gradually relinquish day-to-day operational control of that technology. This is happening but mainly in the United States and United Kingdom.
• Virtualization has been a boon to operations: Despite an explosion in complexity, the study suggests virtualization has improved service quality and operational staff productivity and morale. Productivity improves because more server instances must be supported by the same number of administrators, or fewer in some instances.  Conventional wisdom would suggest this increased workload would impair morale, but staff members are enjoying the novelty of the new technology. Eventually, this novelty will diminish and automation may be needed to address the heavier workload.