Last week, we reviewed the basics of virtualization in order to provide an understanding of the technology and how businesses are utilizing it. The buzz surrounding virtualization is only getting stronger as IT professionals look for tools to maximize their budget and productivity. Server virtualization has been a game-changing technology for IT, providing efficiencies and capabilities that just aren’t possible when constrained to a physical environment. There are several benefits to IT professionals and businesses that choose to implement virtualization, including:
Cost Savings: With virtualization, businesses can cut their hardware maintenance costs by lowering the number of physical servers. Several companies are also using virtualization as a means to simplify the ownership and administration of their existing IT servers. In doing so, businesses can decrease their operational costs, such as staffing, powering, backup, hardware, and software maintenance.
Storage Management: By implementing a sever consolidation strategy through the use of virtualization, companies can increase their space utilization. The use of external storage has provided new forms of backup by performing block level copies of the hard disk drive. Since the storage is centrally arranged, de-duplication of data now a mainstream technology – either in-line for all data or in backup for reduced backup sizes.
Today, one physical server contains only one operating system, but virtualization offers the capability to put multiple operating systems in a single server. Basically, if a company has multiple servers performing small but vital tasks, virtualization provides the ability to collapse each server into a very high density cluster that uses much less space.
Business Continuity: I could talk about the importance of business continuity until I’m blue in the face – it seems to be very underrated by companies until they experience an outage or disruption of service. However, by that time – it’s too late, and the data has been lost. To ensure this doesn’t happen to your company, virtualization is a great tool to use as your “safety net”.
When you run things in a physical server environment, you generally need to buy another set of the identical hardware for your disaster recover site. If your company is running virtually, then there is no need to purchase expensive, duplicate equipment as backup. Additionally, virtualization simplifies your disaster recovery because there are fewer servers to deal with.
These are only three benefits offered by virtualization. Other benefits include increased uptime, better operations with automation, scaling, and reduced environmental impacts. The growing popularity of virtualization has yet to slow down, with more and more businesses realizing its benefits every day.
To learn more about virtualization, click here.
Blog Author: Vanessa Hartung
