With basic virtualization technology, IT managers can consolidate physical resources and take a stand against rising CapEx costs. But the full potential of virtualization will remain elusive until you combine virtualization with a strong management platform.
In a recent survey of IT managers, Frost & Sullivan identified a number of common data center challenges: high maintenance costs, administrative complexity, poor workload performance, and minimizing downtime for applications. In each instance, a strong management capability can curb the challenge and help IT managers draw greater value from their existing resources and support private cloud deployments. But what makes for a strong management platform? Consider these characteristics:
Consistent management capabilities
Optimizing IT and easing administrative complexity require automation. For that, you need a management platform that supports virtualization of applications and predictive analytics, and delivers purpose-built operational automation.
Compute and storage resources that use intelligent operations
Ensuring workload performance takes a platform that simplifies management. Your platform should provide infrastructure reliability and application uptime, smart alerts, application awareness and dependency mapping, and real-time log analytics.
Automation and control capabilities
Offloading routine maintenance can free up the IT staff to focus on innovation. You need a platform that delivers automated workload placement and load balancing capabilities, policy-based storage management, customizable actions, policies, and workflows, and automated capacity optimization and planning.
VMware addresses each of these requirements with vSphere® with Operations Management™, a virtualization platform that provides enterprises with the visibility to proactively optimize their IT environments. With the VMware platform, IT managers can monitor real-time data on more than 600 key performance indicators, assess and ensure operational health, and take preemptive action before problems materialize.
