Bottleneck Pushing
    The versatile Lee Pender, who writes a blog for 
Redmond Channel Partner magazine as well as serving capably as Executive Editor for 
Redmond magazine, my old stomping grounds, has an interesting 
blog item up about a meeting he recently took with HP. 
He quotes an HP virtualization executive who brings up a good point. From Lee's entry:
  "In the physical IT environment, if you needed additional capacity for  a marketing program you were going to run, you expected a month to get  that capacity," said Bob Meyer, worldwide lead for HP virtualization  solutions. "Now, with a server and hypervisor, I can set it up in  minutes. I can set up a server much faster, but I'm really just pushing  bottlenecks. I have a new environment, much more mobile, much harder to  see."
He's right, too. The bottleneck is still there; it's just migrated, to use a favorite virtualization term. An analyst had this to say of the solution: 
  "We see virtualization and automation being inextricably linked.  There's no way to separate the two. You cannot do virtualization  without automation."
He's also right, for the most part. Small shops won't have many virtualization issues that can be solved with automation, but automation will be at the heart of enterprise virtualization management going forward. Without it, scalability bumps up against a very low ceiling. Anyway, the whole article is worth a read, as Lee's stuff always is.
 
	
Posted by Keith Ward on 04/14/2009 at 12:48 PM