Anyone who has worked in IT for more than five minutes knows that the field has been in a dramatic transformation for the past 10 years, invading and conquering other organizational domains such as communications and security, while also wrestling with the new issues that technology has wrought such as employee mobility. In most organizations, IT has had to transform itself from a bunch of techies installing and troubleshooting equipment to a key enabler of business strategy and competitiveness.
Throughout, outsourcing and offshoring have shaken the foundations of IT, making some wonder at times if they have a role in their organization at all. And those who work in outsourcing companies also have to figure out what their role is when they are supporting a variety of clients.
What do all these changes mean for the typical IT employee today? What skills should an IT staffer be nurturing to enhance his or her career in a changing market? From InfoWorld's research, it's clear that IT staff need to bolster their skills and certifications in three key categories: technology, process, and business skills.
The essential technology skills for IT staff
Despite all the changes the profession has gone through as it has become intertwined with the business, IT is still about technology at its core. Today, several technologies stand out as enticing career opportunities due to their complexity and the shortage of IT expertise around them. Four stand out in particular: virtualization, unified communications, wireless, and modern application development.
Virtualization. In the rush to consolidate operations and reduce IT capital costs, virtualization has taken off, particularly server virtualization.
But the introduction of virtualization to reduce hardware and energy usage has brought in a new challenge: how to manage the virtual environment. "Virtual machines are so easy to develop and so difficult to manage," says Mike Walsh, a product manager for Global Knowledge, an IT and business training organization. "If you're creating virtual machines that can be moved all around physical servers, updated or not, documented or not, protected or not, how in the world do you manage it all? You can have a single physical server running dozens of different operating systems, including a legacy application on an old version of NT. It's very challenging."
As demand for virtualization skills increases, training and certification programs from both independent trainers and virtualization vendors are starting to appear for virtualization management. Although such training is useful, the best way to enhance your virtualization career, experts say, is to get real-world training on the job, especially through a large virtualization project.
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. Zones provide focussed content from Computerworld and leading technology partners.
Unisys Real Time Infrastructure solutions embody Unisys “less is more” approach to IT infrastructure, freeing IT organisations to deploy a simplified, more easily managed IT infrastructure that allows them to spend less time on routine management activities and more time on strategic initiatives that advance the business.
Virtualisation Knowledge Centre supported by Unisys and Intel
Video
Click on the link below to see Real Time Infrastructure defined and an explanation of its key benefits. You can also hear how Unisys has embraced RTI in its own IT infrastructure.
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Podcast
Click on the link below to hear Unisys RTI expert Al Bender discuss virtualisation trends and issues.
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Whitepapers
The Virtualisation Landscape to 2010
This white paper provides insights on the further evolution of virtualisation now and through to 2010, what it will do to IT infrastructure, its role within business for those who embrace it and the detrimental impact on those who don’t.
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Good for Business - Virtualisation in Perspective
Data centres are a critical component of modern business strategies, and their importance is continually growing. But so is the cost of running and supporting them. This paper looks at the urgent challenges facing organisations and their data centres, and explores some of the ways in which technology can help to address them.
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Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite
The Unisys Infrastructure Management Suite helps your organisation overcome the challenges of creating an optimised IT infrastructure with cutting-edge technology and services. As such, it is an integral component of the Unisys Real-Time Infrastructure – a long-term vision of what business and IT can achieve together.
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Comparing Multi-Core Server Virtualisation
Intel IT tested servers based on select Intel multi-core processors to analyse the potential role of each in data center server virtualisation strategies. Each server provided significant potential benefits in performance, power consumption per workload, and operating costs over older servers running non-virtualised workloads.
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Comparing Two & Four Socket Platforms for Server Virtualisation
Intel IT tested servers based on select Intel multi-core processors to analyse the potential role of each in data center server virtualisation strategies. Each server provided significant potential benefits in performance, power consumption per workload, and operating costs over older servers running non-virtualised workloads.
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Implementing Virtualisation in a Global Business-Computing Environment
Intel IT planned, engineered, and has begun deploying a virtualised business-computing production environment at several data centers, a rollout that will continue through 2008. The initiative has already confirmed anticipated virtualisation benefits such as faster, more automated deployment. Intel are initially consolidating older servers running applications that are not mission-critical; with opportunities to achieve 16:1 consolidation ratios using two-socket virtualisation hosts based on Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors.
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