The shape of future cloud computing.

Maintaining productive and smoothly running business operations is absolutely mission critical — and that is even more evident in today's challenging economic conditions. The critical components of an effective IT infrastructure — servers, storage, software, and all of the networking links — must be up and running, all the time, to maintain business momentum and employee productivity. In many midsize businesses, current IT systems may not be up to date or easy to manage, and this situation sets the stage for potential problems down the road.

The massive expansion of compute infrastructure over the last few decades have left many organizations facing power and cooling, floor space, and administrative challenges. Current challenges within these environments include data center floor space limits, excessive energy costs, and constraints on administrative resources. Given these conditions, many IT managers seek a more reasonable IT infrastructure strategy. By embracing application and server consolidation strategies, IT managers can gain real efficiencies that lower costs and streamline operations.

The adoption of technology solutions can address many of the specifics around mitigating business risks, including server refreshes, operating system upgrades, centralized security policies and systems, consistent management practices, storage backup and recovery practices, encryption/de-encryption of data files, and networking security for wired and wireless LANs. Best practices, which are built on solutions already tested to work at customer sites and implemented through management policies, reduce the variations in implementation that often cause business risk to manifest itself in systems that go offline.

The current state of the majority of IT infrastructures, combined with an economic headwind and the success of virtualization, has created tremendous buzz and confusion around the notion of cloud computing. The first thing that needs to be understood is: What is cloud computing and how can it help our unique situations? The confusion and debate around "clouds" will linger for the foreseeable future, VMware has the ability to provide the building blocks, create standards, and shape the future of cloud computing.

Companies of all sizes and across all industries are under pressure to do more with fewer resources, to innovate products and services, and to continuously turn a profit. While this may seem like a tall task, having the right infrastructure in place can help any IT organization meet all three of these goals. This tool will allow you to model the direct and indirect power, real estate, adaptive usage and existing system maintenance savings that come with migration from existing server platforms to newer, more efficient platforms with enhanced virtualization capabilities.

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