Swainson: Virtualization Everywhere in 5 Years

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NEW YORK — The computing resources that make the bedrock of IT will be
virtualized over the next five years to alleviate the tangled Web of
complexity in data centers.

Virtualization, in which software on physical machines is split up to act as
several physical machines, is showing up in processors, storage, networks,
applications and databases.

John Swainson

Source: CA

However, these technologies create more complexity and need to be carefully
managed as “enterprise IT management,” said
CA (Quote, Chart) CEO John Swainson during his keynote at the Interop
New York 2006 event here.

That complexity is in large part derived from the automation of computers
and all of the networking gear, applications, management and security
infrastructure that connect and power them.

This complexity is manifested in remotely connected devices, as well as new
types of security applications to corral those gadgets.

Moreover, these
technologies must work with existing environments and legacy technology,
such as mainframes.

In short, complexity derives from treating complexity.

“Businesses are continuing to automate their business processes, and that’s a
good thing,” Swainson said. “It ensures that productivity will increase, and
that drives up productivity and enables economic growth.

“But each time we do it we add another layer of complexity to the IT
environment … The level of complexity is becoming overwhelming.”

Swainson noted that CIOs can use virtualization to cut through the time-and
cost-consuming of traditional custom coding.

However, the next step is to find a way to choreograph the components in a
virtualized environment, which is where service-oriented architectures (SOA)
come in.

SOAs (define), he said, offer standard interfaces connected to
centralized repositories, as well as a standard way for vendor software to
integrate processes and transactions to allow for the smooth consumption of
Web services (define).

But SOAs trigger the need for more management.

Complexity spawned by virtualization and SOAs, as well as the uptick in
computing usage associated with falling IT costs, is creating the need for
stronger management schemas.

“We need to drive relentlessly to full process automation via technology …
even as new and disruptive technologies emerge and are exploited,” Swainson
said.

Then came the pitch: Swainson said CA’s enterprise IT management plan
includes security, enterprise systems management (ESM) for storage, and
business service optimization (BSO) “to do for IT what ERP did for business
processes.”

Enterprise resource planning provided a framework for managing application
processes, which is what CA hopes to accomplish at a holistic level with
EITM.

The idea is to rapidly respond to business changes, but be proactive about
them where possible to accommodate such technologies as Web services, RFID
(define) and VoIP (define).

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