Surviving in an aggressively competitive and globalized business world demands continuity of business come what may. To ensure that the business operations are running round the clock requires organizations to work towards geographic redundancy. However, to combat geographic redundancy, most organizations think to establish data centers in various locations across geographical boundaries.

1. Data center Virtualization: Ensuring Business Continuity in a Globalized
Environment
Surviving in an aggressively competitive and globalized business world demands continuity of business
come what may. To ensure that the business operations are running round the clock requires
organizations to work towards geographic redundancy. However, to combat geographic redundancy,
most organizations think to establish data centers in various locations across geographical boundaries.
But this may not be a feasible action as this leads to replicated applications and data duplication. The
other option is to work out solutions which can help in replicating only the mission critical ones through
data center virtualization. .
Datacenters which came into existence with the growing need for faster information storage and retrieval
across various locations were built with a life span of nearly ten years. However, as the high density IT
equipments came into use, it consumed power and generated heat more than the expectations leading to
daily challenges for the organizations. By virtualization of the datacenter, the organization benefits
through the successful use of infrastructure, availability of data and ensures operational efficiency.
Besides, data center virtualization brings in savings in the form of reducing server, footprints, 40-80 %
less power consumption and cooling requirements. Further, when considering the maintenance and
management of the servers and systems in data centers, the concept of data center virtualization steals
the show with reduction in hardware acquisition, overhead costs, secure and high performance
architecture.
As the demands for datacenter virtualization grew, the leading IT organizations with extensive
experience in IT operations and management have become the favorable choice for many small and
medium business organizations as well as the as large corporate giants. Besides the traditional
virtualization across applications networks and systems, these IT giants have also included the data
center virtualization as a part of the package deal in the virtualization-as-a- service offer. The client
organizations benefits with facilities of virtualization without any upfront investment.
Datacenter Virtualization lifecycle can be enumerated as a 5-phase process starting from the
Assessment- analysis of the existing infrastructure, applications, its performance statistics and
business requirement.
Architectural changes through creating operational design and defining the requirements for
environmental changes.
Implementation of virtual Infrastructure and integrating with application and network
Facility Management and
Transformation

2. However, even though datacenter virtualization offered the global organizations strategic benefits like
agility, flexibility, better network capacity and on-demand data center hosting services across different
locations, the green data center solutions offered the organizations sustainability in business operations.
By assessing the energy usage and carbon footprints followed by gap analysis and feasibility study, this
provided for more than 30% savings on operational costs.
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