Desktop virtualisation harks back to the good old mainframe days of centralised computing while upholding the fine desktop tradition of user empowerment. Each user retains his or her own instance of desktop operating system and applications, but that stack runs in a virtual machine on a server -- which users can access through a low-cost thin client similar to an old-fashioned terminal.
As IT infrastructures become increasingly converged and components increasingly interdependent, IT administrators are still not factoring in the collateral impact of individual changes to the IT environment, says one executive.
Joe Wolke, director of IT strategy for Illinois-based IT consulting firm Forsythe Solutions Group, says that while technology trends like virtualisation, storage consolidation, cloud computing and hosted applications serve to streamline IT functions, they also change the traditional IT equation.
"In many ways they are making infrastructure less complex, but are making the model for identifying direct costs much more complex," says Wolke.
Changes to the IT environment like adding a new application, business unit or geographic location will have a greater impact than is immediately observable. The foundational issue of running IT as a business, says Wolke, is ensuring costs are transparent and comprehensible to users.
He says it is critical to align the lifecycle of a new application with that of the associated physical assets. This means recognising that storage and servers required for the application may not have the same lifespan, so all costs must be accounted for down the road.
Wolke suggests organisations develop "collateral impact metrics" to measure and account for the impact that radiates throughout the IT environment. "If I add 10 more users to the network, what is the impact on the network?" he says.
Factoring in costs of collateral impact should also happen at the project management phase as applications are being developed. While an organisation's impact metric might state that a new application for 1000 users will require five help desk people, that number will surely rise to fit the initial learning curve, says Wolke.
On a more granular level, building new applications deserves the same degree of collateral impact planning. Coding is dependent on various components including bits of code, and small applications and licensing from third parties that must be made part of a disaster recovery plan, says Wolke. "There is much more dependency. Applications don't stand alone anymore," he says.
A new study from Forrester Research shows that application developers and their project managers are not keeping up with the times. Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst with Forrester, says IT pros aren't necessarily adjusting to what is the new reality of a tough economy and the popularity of certain technology trends.
The Forrester research recommends five changes to application development professionals:
* Embrace the cloud: Developers must understand how to design and architect applications differently to take advantage of the cloud especially when it comes to cloud-specific strategies for scaling data. "Data is the Achilles heel of cloud computing when it comes to application development," says Gualtieri.
* Find your inner startup: The unrelenting focus of startups is to make money, so developers should take that lean approach in tough times even if they work for a large enterprise. "It is really about focus, about trying to get beyond all the processes, politics and management that normally occur as an organization grows," says Gualtieri.
* Favour flexibility and cost over platform loyalty: Enterprise IT is typically driven by the procurement department's decree to stick to a particular vendor stack. Entertain other options like smaller vendors or open source, says Gualtieri. "They are potentially cheaper and give you more flexibility rather than waiting a year for a large enterprise software vendor to get what you need," he says.
* Become passionate about user experience: Users want an app experience that is valuable, easy and aesthetically pleasing, and application development teams must catch on to that ever-growing demand.
* Coach your talent: Project managers often view their developers as "automatons on an assembly line," but software is a creative art, like making a movie, says Gualtieri. IT skills selection must align with the needs of the specific project. "If this is a customer-facing web site, it is a different skill set than a departmental application," he says.
A bug in Microsoft's software gives hackers a way to exploit virtual Windows machines which would be attack-proof if they were running on real hardware, a researcher said today.
Virtualization company VMware has reported a healthy increase in revenue for the fourth quarter, thanks largely to gains from software maintenance fees.
A third of enterprises are looking to move to desktop virtualisation according to research from desktop services specialist Centrix. More than three-quarters of the respondents said that cost reduction was the prime driver for the move to the technology.
In just a few short years storage virtualisation, also known as block virtualisation, has proven its worth in the large enterprise, having travelled that well-worn path from pricey boutique solution to affordable commodity. As a standard feature in all but the most modest mid-tier storage arrays, storage virtualisation soothes a wide range of storage management woes for small and mid-size organisations. At the same time, dedicated solutions from top-tier vendors deliver the greatest ROI to large shops managing large SANs with intense data availability requirements.
VMware has added support for Windows 7 and expanded the ability to handle virtual processors in Workstation 7, the new version of its platform for running multiple OSes simultaneously on a PC.
VMware's third-quarter profit dropped by more than half as the company invested more heavily in research and development, though its revenue increased 4 percent from a year earlier, the company said Wednesday.
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IT departments today may be looking to hire virtualisation specialists, but as the technology becomes mainstream for servers, desktops, storage and networks, industry watchers and high-tech hiring managers say virtual know-how will become a standard requirement for many IT job candidates.
As budgets tighten, IT bosses need to do more to sell the benefits of consolidation, says Andrew Crabb, CIO of TelstraClear.