IT Trends & Technology

T professionals are continually challenged to find new and more efficient ways to implement and manage heavily used applications to enable their business. Because one single server cannot possibly handle all of the incoming requests or the performance requirements complex applications require, the idea of deploying multiple server instances has taken hold.

Creating a business case for any IT investment is never an easy task, but it can be a critical piece of winning the support of your leadership team to take on a key initiative. Business cases help to present the expected benefits that can positively affect the bottom line and improve overall operations, while also helping to put the potential costs and unknown factors associated with the new technology into context. The business case to migrate to a container-based architecture is no different, but it is also not a new technology. So why would now be a good time for your organization to consider it?

Although it hasn’t yet reached the stage of ubiquity, container technology is well on its way to becoming a fundamental part of the IT infrastructure toolbox. While its many uses revolve around applications and app development, they are delivering ROI in multiple forms. A Forrester study found that 66 percent of organizations who adopted containers experienced accelerated developer efficiency with even more seeing an increase in application deployment speed.

There are plenty of reputable sources that point to near parity in container adoption versus virtualization, such as SDxCentral’s 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration Report. The bigger story is the many potential users that are still on the fence about containerization. The hesitation of this significant base of holdouts often stems from the fact that they don’t know as much about containerization as they do about virtualization.

A recent IDC white paper survey of medium to large enterprises and their data center servers found that 55 percent of capacity is unused, resulting in Capex waste because of inefficient utilization. Equally important is the Opex waste from the time and personnel resources needed to provision workloads in a scenario in which increased server consolidation process time results in higher costs.