Why do organizations adopt virtualization technology Part 2

In the post Why do organizations adopt virtualization technology?, I tried to present some of the goals organizations have discussed for why they embarked on the journey to a virtualized environment and then tie those goals to which type of virtualization they chose first. The reasons for using access, application and processing virtualization technology were presented in that post. This post will look at why folks say they've adopted network or storage virtualization technology.

Those adopting network virtualization technology often have a very complex network infrastructure, one that has become hard to manage. They've found that breaking the physical network into subnets based upon organizational boundaries or application usage just presented them with a difficult management challenge. They've found that it is very hard to gain an overview of a "chopped up network." Network virtualization technology allows the physical structure of the network to be defined based upon technical considerations and the logical structure, the one see by individual systems, to be defined based upon other criteria. In this case, network virtualization was the tool selected but, management of the network infrastructure and protecting those assets were the real goals of the IT staff.

Storage virtualization is the beginning point for organizations seeking to reduce the costs associated with storage by sharing resources among systems and allowing the storage devices to be used to support many generations of systems. These organizations also chose this path because they wanted to reduce or avoid costs associated with management of storage. Some also hoped to improve levels of security as well.

Management of virtualized resources is a separate category of virtualization technology. It will be covered in a future post.

If your organization is using one of these types of virtualization technology, what were the original objectives for the adoption of that technology? Did the technology help the organization achieve those objectives?