By Barbara DePompa

Federal government organizations increasingly are incorporating virtualization to consolidate IT resources, reduce space and power consumption and gain greater agility in launching new applications and services for employees and constituents.

That’s because virtualized servers, applications and storage can help reduce data center costs by consolidating servers and increasing utilization from a typical level of 5% to 10%, to as much as 60% to 80%. According to industry estimates, the primary benefits of virtualization technologies include:

*Reduced downtime – eliminating planned downtime and preventing or reducing unplanned downtime through the sharing of hardware and automated restart of application servers. Properly implemented, virtualization can enable a dramatic reduction in time to recovery following a disaster.

*Lower costs – by reducing the need for added hardware and specialized software.

*Simplified processes – by removing the complexity of maintaining an exact duplicate of a data center’s physical systems for COOP, and streamlining the recovery process.

*Broader protection – IT organizations can increase resource availability and ensure more rapid recovery of critical applications via virtualization.

Industry analysts note virtualization technologies play a key role in decreasing power consumption as well. “Virtualization can help government organizations reduce energy and space requirements, often by as much as 50%,” said Andi Mann, vice president of research for Enterprise Management Associates, Inc., in Boulder, Colo.

Greater agility is among the biggest virtualization drivers, Mann said. In environments leveraging virtualization, administrators can ramp up new services far more quickly than in traditional software development, he said. The difference is dramatic, according to Mann. “Turnaround for new applications decreases from an average of up to 90 days, to a matter of two to four hours, which gives government IT organizations are real boost in responding quickly to ever-changing operational requirements,” he said.

As government IT organizations learn to apply sophisticated management tools, they can also better optimize virtualization’s advantages, Mann said, including greater consolidation, staff savings and even further power reductions. Mann cautioned, however that a reduction in staff requirements may be an elusive goal. That’s because while many organizations believe virtualization simplifies IT operations, it actually adds layers of complexity to existing physical computing environments, Mann said. “This, combined with a shortage of knowledgeable virtualization professionals are two of the primary reasons why some organizations haven’t broadly invested in such solutions,” he explained.

In fact, the primary obstacles to virtualization investments, according to EMA’s research, are internal politics, along with difficulties inherent in dealing with multiple departments, as well as getting application owners to ‘share’ computing resources, Mann said. “The obstacles to virtualization are primarily driven by human issues, based on what survey respondents report,” he explained.

Meanwhile, among organizations using virtualization, there has been a strong acceleration of both application and desktop virtualization technologies (up by an average of 25%, as compared to server-based solutions, which are growing at a steady 20% pace.)

In the future, Mann expects to see an increase in the number of IT organizations turning to virtualization services, rather than actual hardware/software-based technological solutions, due to the challenges associated with human issues, along with complexity, the cost of implementation and a general lack of support for applications in a virtual environment. “This may simply be easier to manage as a service, rather than as a stack of technologies that must be supported and centrally controlled,” he explained.

One of the biggest challenges public sector organizations face as they plan for data center modernization is how to incorporate virtualization technologies to best leverage legacy systems and applications that are still widely used. Some industry observers claim the growing expense of data center infrastructures will make cloud computing attractive, as agencies could pay a set fee per hour for cloud computing services, rather than investing millions in additional data center construction.