Role Overview: Virtual Infrastructure Architect

As the adoption of virtualization across servers, storage, and networks continues to climb and organizations push to larger implementations of virtual infrastructure, a new question arises: Who is going to manage your virtual infrastructure? Sure, you could continue as you have in the past, with each technology group managing the virtualization as it pertains to their particular silo, but who, for example, will oversee the interdependencies between virtual storage and networks? Who will set policies and standards and ensure that they are adhered to? The answer comes in the emerging role of the virtual infrastructure (VI) architect — an employee (or group of employees) who oversees the operation of both the physical and virtualization platform across server, storage, and network infrastructure domains.