ABSTRACT
Many motivating factors have led to the emergence of cloud computing. Businesses require services that include both infrastructure and application workload requests, while meeting defined service levels for capacity, resource tiering, and availability. IT delivery often necessitates costs and efficiencies that create a perception of IT as a hindrance, not a strategic partner. Issues include underutilized resources, overprovisioning or underprovisioning of resources, lengthy deployment times, and lack of cost visibility. Virtualization is the first step toward addressing some of these challenges by enabling improved utilization through server consolidation, workload mobility through hardware independence, and efficient management of hardware resources.
