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Virtualization and transit: IT that improves operations and strengthens customer service.

Article Excerpt
Customers need and expect access to current information. In the world of transit, this means access to updated schedules, notifications of delays or changes, best routes to use and transfers to other systems. And, in a Web 2.0-enabled world, customers expect this information to be available at their fingertips, whenever and wherever they need it, no matter the type of Internet connection or end device they use. Emails or text messages explaining detours and delays, "tweets" telling riders what time the next bus will arrive at their stop, Web access to the latest schedules and information, You Tube videos explaining safety and service features, video feeds showing on-site conditions ... Transit must work to incorporate emerging Web technologies into daily operations in order to fit seamlessly into the daily lives of our customers.

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The challenge, of course, is applying emerging technologies to information delivery while using legacy infrastructures. According to some industry estimates, many agencies spend more than 70 percent of precious IT resources on these aging systems. Further compounding the problem is a lack of training resources to help employees learn the new technologies.

With the growth of emerging Web technologies as powerful operations and customer service tools, virtualization technologies are gaining favor as the key to managing and optimizing the datacenter. Virtualization can deliver applications to end users and ultimately can improve the experience of both employee and customer alike--without a complete overhaul of the legacy infrastructure. Virtualization also improves secure access to networks and data, and can help the transit organization to "go green" in new and more pronounced ways.

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OPTIMIZING THE DATACENTER

The datacenter is the heart and soul of transportation technology, which depends on it to provide a quality service to the customer. The ability to leverage emerging Webtechnologies to deliver better, faster, safer data and applications to both employees and customers ultimately depends on the ability of the datacenter to support those technologies. However, the patchwork solution of just adding more physical servers to increase capacity and facilitate emerging technologies creates server sprawl. These datacenters become overloaded with servers that, most likely, are not even running near full capacity though they place a huge strain on personnel, as well as financial and environmental resources. I am aware of one server setup for a specific application that used only 7 percent of the server's capacity. Although probably a good decision at the time, it resulted in an...

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