By David Black
Implementing a virtualization strategy in your business could yield many benefits. Virtualization is the process of utilizing specific software to create a virtual environment, such as virtual servers, desktops and networks. If you are interested in reducing IT expenses while increasing efficiency, virtualization is an effective strategy to implement. Here are six reasons to virtualize your business today:
Increased agility for your business
By virtualizing your business, you gain the ability to do much more with much less. By upgrading your infrastructure and processes, your company will gain the capability to respond quicker to the ever-changing business needs. By employing virtualization, your business can amass network resources to keep up with the increasing user demands, while reducing operational costs. Virtualization allows your business to accommodate change quickly at a lower cost by maximizing your current resources.
Better disaster recovery
Virtualization improves disaster recovery by eliminating the need to rebuild servers when they go down and the need to keep a bench stock of replacement hardware. Having virtual servers in place drastically reduces the recovery time and, as we all know, time equals money. What would normally take a few days can be accomplished within a few hours because there is no need to rebuild any servers, operating systems or applications separately, as everything exists somewhere else and can be returned online. With a virtual server, you also gain the ability to test your disaster recovery on the virtual image without disrupting operations.
Improved uptime
When you pool several servers for virtualization, you end up with a supercomputer, so to speak. If one of the virtual servers goes down, there is no effect on the remaining virtual servers and they continue to operate as normal. Virtual servers also offer more benefits than a traditional server, such as fault tolerance, distributed resource scheduling, live migration and storage migration. These features allow virtual machines to recover quickly from unplanned outages.
Application longevity
If your business has any legacy applications which run on prehistoric PCs, these applications and their environments can be preserved and maintained through virtualization. Most legacy applications do not run on modern operating systems or hardware. More than likely, they are not even supported by the originating company. When you take these applications and go virtual, you segregate them from the modern software and hardware, that isn’t compatible.
Isolated and secure applications
With physical servers, applications and servers are typically paired one-for-one to isolate applications. While this is an effective way to keep your applications segregated, it is not efficient, by any standards. This sprawl of physical servers not only requires a lot of space, but it also demands a lot of resources. With virtualization, applications can be isolated on multiple virtual machines across many fewer physical servers. Think of it like having your Thanksgiving dinner on a school lunch tray with single, serving compartments rather than having a single plate for each different food item, much like my children, who can’t fathom the idea of their green beans touching their potatoes — the horror. If malware happens to find its way into one of your applications, you don’t want it spilling over and touching any other application on your network.
Reduced resource consumption
Reducing your physical footprint by migrating to virtual machines, you consolidate onto fewer servers. This drastically lowers your cooling and power costs, which frees up funding to be spend elsewhere. Server consolidation can reduce your energy costs by up to 80 percent, according to cloud computing company VMware. The reduced number of physical servers also opens more real estate in your office.
David Black is the director of business development for Wasatch I.T., a Utah provider of outsourced IT services for small and medium-sized businesses.