Virtualisation takes a quantum leap

It is nearly impossible to precisely know where data is at any one time in a virtual environment; nevertheless, it is the user experience and the impact to business in other words most important.

The largest gatherings of business partners

Blackwell spoke at one of the largest gatherings of business partners and IT leaders in SA, the CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2011, held in Sandton.

“In the IT industry, we are seeing that with cloud computing and virtualisation; it turns out that virtualised resources in the cloud are very similar to sub atomic particles in quantum physics. It is impossible to know precisely where they are and how fast they are performing together,” explained Blackwell.

Blackwell said the end-user usually doesn't know or care about where the data sits in a virtualised environment; whether it's in the public, private or public cloud. But, he said, it's up to IT to measure IT effectiveness to design the best strategy to meet growing business demands.

He said: “Service level agreements are not specified in terms of processor and memory utilisation, network throughput and system availability.

The business

In order to better serve the business, Blackwell recommended that IT needs to deploy transaction management, bringing at the same time infrastructure to fit with business service management.

He said a then-designed business service management strategy combining both IT environment and business requirements will improve the end-user experience and provide an overall view of where IT resources sit in the organisation.