I was recently at a roundtable discussion on the subject of virtualisation, where both end users and vendors were present. I thought I’d share with you some of the questions that were raised during the session, and the answers that were given.

Q. Why are so many businesses interested in virtualisation ?

The primary motivator was around cost reduction and lack of budget. Virtualisation is clearly helping some companies save money and live within very tight budgets. One company lost a couple of servers that they couldn’t afford to replace, so they too out the hard drives, copied them onto another more powerful server and just brought them up on a virtual machine to replace the hardware that died. Another company found they had to adjust the UPS supply at least once a year. By virtualising, they were able to skip some of these adjustment cycles and also halve the number of servers in their computer room.

Q. What is the cost of virtualisation  ?

There is clearly a need for an initial investment, in SANS and Blade servers, but once that investment has been made, then it allows you to forget about the hardware. Any future development work can be done quickly and simply without having to go back for further investment every time you need to do new development.

Q. Was power and space a consideration ?

Absolutely. The analyst community suggests that power will become the largest cost in six to seven years. We already know that no more power can be fed into Canary Wharf in London, which of course is a major headache for the Financial Service community headquartered there.

Q How difficult was the move to virtualisation ?

“It wasn’t as hard as our IT people expected” was one response. The observation was made that storage virtualisation was more complex that servers. The challenge when remapping resources wasn’t really the technology but knowing what the asset base was. When a system has been in use for several years, you may not actually know who’s using it until you turn it off ! but once done, the savings in software licences and power are very clear .

Just a few interesting observations. Do you have any comments or additional thoughts ? I look forward to hearing from you.

Gordon.

Greetings, Blogger Community,

Over the forthcoming weeks and months I would like to generate some discussion around one of my current favourite topics - mobile banking and payments. We're seeing a lot of news items almost on a daily basis, about the huge growth of mobile banking, and mobile payments. Firstly, let's get some definitions in place (these are mine, by the way, and open to challenge !)

Mobile Banking: The use of handheld/mobile devices to perform personal banking functions that have in recent years been performed through Internet banking. I'm sure most people these days are familiar with Internet Banking - access to account information for account balances, transfer of funds between accounts, bill payment (i.e. transferring funds to pre-defined recipients such as utility companies, inland revenue. etc)

Mobile Payments: Use of handheld/mobile devices for paying for services or goods, instead of paying with cash, cheques, credit/debit cards.

We can get onto the subject of security on another discussion thread (and that could be quite a long one !), but the discussion I'd like to kick off here is around whether the current usage of mobile phones and smart phones is adequate for mobile banking purposes, or would Mobile Internet Devices (see http://www.intel.com/products/mid/), because of their larger screens and therefore their ability in theory to provide a richer and  more rewarding user experience, be a more attractive proposition. Will smartphones actually be displaced by MIDs, as has been suggested might happen in markets such as Asia ?

I look forward to hearing your comments.