Cambridge IT managers talk virtualisation, cloud

Mirza Baig is a computer officer at Wolfson College, Cambridge, which adopted virtualisation technology just three months ago.

"We'd been looking into it for the past year," Baig told ZDNet UK. "It's server virtualisation, using Xen. We have about 15 servers, and the server room is quite small, and we have no space. It's an initial investment but cheaper in the long term. The main advantage is resilience — energy costs are not our main concern, but there is an advantage there. We have the air conditioning at maximum capacity in our server room."

Baig said that, while virtualisation is "quite a new technology", he and his colleagues had found it simple to implement. "Training was an issue at the start but, once you know what you're doing, it's OK."

Xen was developed at Cambridge, and Baig praised the virtualisation technology as "a robust product and much cheaper than VMware". He did, however, complain that Xen's pricing structure was not very clear, saying that "the Xen guys [now within Xen's new owner, Citrix] need to invest more in marketing".

He also pointed to "poor" documentation for virtualisation products as a whole. "There is no big knowledge base on the internet you can trust," Baig said. "We need a website comprehensively dedicated to virtualisation."