Hu Yoshida, chief technical officer at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), has urged businesses to align their processes and personnel with the use of virtualisation in IT systems.

In a blog post, he explains that he has witnessed cases of large enterprises which do not take up the use of virtualisation as their IT infrastructure is segregated between different departments. But he warns that this is the incorrect approach, adding that IT infrastructure should be governed by the needs of the enterprise as a whole if costs are to be optimised and business units made to see the wider picture.

"Storage virtualisation has been ready for primetime for over five years in our case; what does it take for this IT shop to be ready for storage virtualisation?" he asks.

Mr Yoshida previously wrote that, while there are inevitable overheads associated with implementing some virtualisation-related services - such as thin provisioning - HDS does all it can to ensure that these are minimised in its own products.