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IT professionals, their managers and C-level executives understand that server virtualisation can deliver significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. Yet, in the rush to virtualise servers in the short term, many companies do not understand how to get the most out of virtualisation, or how to prepare their IT infrastructures to benefit over the long term.

A recent Imation survey of 1,200 IT professionals in midsized organisations reveals a point that may seem obvious at first glance: The more an IT organisation commits to virtualising their operations, the more efficiencies they gain.

However, making those deployments strategic to the business over the long term requires careful planning and technology investment. IT organisations seeking to make strategic investments in virtualisation should consider the following:

1. Plan for operational scalability: Projects intended to virtualise just one or two applications for physical server consolidation will miss out on the potential for broader operational impact.

Virtualisation creates efficiencies across many aspects of an IT operation, including how hardware and software are used, how much physical space is needed and even how IT administrators use their time. In addition, virtualisation management software can provide a granular level of detail about the performance, capacity and availability of virtual servers.

IT departments with a plan to achieve operational scalability are better positioned to gain a greater understanding of the cost and value of each IT project or specific resource. Eventually, IT professionals can implement "chargeback" or "showback" models. These models - notable requirements for cloud environments - provide IT with detailed insights into the IT consumption cost of each line of business or individual user. As a result, IT professionals can report on cost and time savings, and they can view IT consumption on a strategic level to make resource allocation decisions.

IT teams often are required to support new applications without additional budget. Strategic virtualisation deployments, which support self-service and automation, enable IT teams to deploy these new applications easily, providing compute, network and storage resources quickly and seamlessly. IT professionals should implement policies and leverage configuration and reporting templates to manage virtual environment growth over time.

2. Learn from pilot projects: Using pilot projects to virtualise less-complex or low-workload applications gives IT professionals critical experience with a "virtual" way of thinking. Pilot projects also allow IT teams to expand their skill sets around virtual server administration. It is remarkable how quickly an IT administrator can adapt from managing three or four physical servers to hundreds of VMs.

Pilot programs help IT teams learn how to get the most out of virtualisation and enable IT professionals to establish VM policies, configuration templates and infrastructure profiles that can be applied to larger projects.

3. Support virtualisation evolution with storage: Imation's research shows that midmarket IT professionals view decisions about storage as key to their overall server virtualisation strategies. Respondents note "increased storage capacity" as a top priority when thinking about virtualisation over the next 12 months. For those managing higher virtualised storage volumes, nearly 70 percent are deploying or considering hybrid storage solutions to support changing IT performance demands.

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