Virtualization challenges: Overcoming the storms

[Shohei_Maruyama]

It’s storm season in enterprise IT.  And there’s not just one, but a series of them, flooding businesses with more complexity, difficulties, and challenges.

We’re through one storm, one touched off by licensing and subscription model changes from one vendor. But there are more on the horizon.

During turbulent times like this, enterprises often face immense pressure to make technical, business, and financial transformations. Adapting is crucial for the continuity and availability of current enterprise IT services.

But by addressing these pressures and implementing effective solutions, businesses can navigate these challenging times and evolve for the future. HPE has vendor- and technology-agnostic approaches and comprehensive services to provide practical advice and solutions with risk-minimized migration technologies to help enterprises thrive amid the ongoing disruptions and prepare for future challenges in the IT landscape.

The storm season

The recent storm around one virtualization software put enterprises under significant pressure to changes on enterprise IT.  Other storms that we’ve witnessed recently in the IT industry include:

• Red Hat Virtualization entered the Maintenance Support Phase in 2022
• Citrix privatized in 2022
• Splunk was acquired in 2023
• VMware was acquired in 2023
• CentOS Linux reached end of life in June 2024
• IBM announced in 2024 that it will acquire HashiCorp
• Pricing models for HCI and hyperscalers continued to change

Individually, these storms are impacting enterprise IT, but their combined effect is immense. And the effect will increase as more anticipated storms pop up. 

How can companies prepare for storm season?

It is crucial that you have a long-term outlook on financial, business, and technical pressures. Enterprises must adjust their IT architecture and functionalities to support continuity of IT services. HPE calls such flexible IT “adoptive enterprise IT.” Adoptive enterprise IT assures enterprises will overcome the series of storms. The three primary aspects of adoptive enterprise IT are: 

1. Abstraction of infrastructure: It is key to have the functionalities and a process of providing a simplified model of the underlying components (compute, storage, and network). The abstraction allows HPE to keep providing IT services without dealing with the complexities and specifics of the technologies and components used.

2. Ease of migration and modernization: This means the simplified and more efficient process of moving and modernizing existing IT applications and data to newer, more advanced architectures and updating them to leverage modern technologies and practices. This is important since more storms are anticipated along the way.

3. X-platform manageability: This refers to the ability to effectively manage and operate different IT environments, applications, data, and resources across multiple platforms and environments. This concept is crucial for organizations that have diverse operating IT services, environments, cloud services, and hardware architectures.

With the concept of “adoptive enterprise IT,” enterprises can overcome storms by abstracting underlying virtualization components; migrating and modernizing applications and data to another architecture; and managing environments seamlessly. 

HPE’s extensive experience, comprehensive portfolio, and commitment to customer success position it as the preferred partner for a seamless and successful virtualization transformation.

HPE advisory and professional services brings decades of expertise in IT infrastructure and cloud solutions to the table. HPE’s experience includes handling diverse scenarios and understanding the nuances of other virtualization transformation solutions by leveraging our platform and workload analysis (Right Mix Advisor) and migration software. 

Learn more about advisory and professional service from HPE Services.