CRN head to head

ANALYST: IBRS

Dr Kevin McIsaac, advisor

The key opportunity today is server virtualisation. This has been the hottest infrastructure trend for the past couple of years and will continue to be the hottest trend for the next few years. While the obvious revenue comes from selling the software licences, resellers should not ignore the significant consulting opportunities in using implementing server virtualisation and establish consulting services around this.

Rather than treat virtualisation as a set of technologies, resellers should view it as a set of capability maturity levels that clients want to attain and vendors can help them achieve.

Resellers should start by consolidating their client’s non-production servers. Generally these systems have lower resource demands than production systems, are only used occasionally and are not business critical. This makes them a lower risk and it is easier to convince the client to try something different. A virtualised test and QA infrastructure enables these testing environments to be rapidly deployed and decommissioned. It also has the benefit of enabling standard testing environments to be quickly configured and deployed. Once sufficient experience has been gained, resellers should use it to consolidate smaller applications onto a virtualised server infrastructure. Finally, once there is a critical mass of virtualised servers, resellers should treat this as an enabling infrastructure for creating application load balancing, high availability and disaster recovery.