Burbank, CA 3/15/2011 1:47:24 AM
News / Business

Virtual Platform Disk Optimizer Brings Additional Advantages to Companies Embracing Virtualization as Solution to Maximizing Resources

As more and more companies are utilizing the technology of virtualization as a means to maximize their resources and encourage growth the days of managing and maintaining multiple servers is quickly becoming a thing of the past. This advancement has certainly been embraced by companies who found they had been dedicating a large percentage of their IT resources to simply keeping their operating systems up and running, an approach to business that not only chewed up a significant amount of money but also slowed or completely halted innovation.

What the popularity of virtualization has done is open the eyes of many companies to the inefficient manner in which they have been operating their business. Many of these companies have been managing multiple servers, most of which have been hosting a single application. The idea behind doing this may have been founded with good intentions but the truth is it has created a great deal of waste.

Most servers that do host a single application are only using a small percentage of the server’s capacity. This single application approach was accepted because there was a fear that if a problem with the application were to cause a server crash then it would only affect that one server, leaving the remaining servers intact thus not compromising the applications that were being hosted on those servers. What this meant was that a server was utilizing a minimal percentage of its capacity to host an application, wasting the majority of its storage space.

What many companies found was that this approach, managing multiple servers that hosted few applications, took its toll on the IT team. Instead of concentrating on development the emphasis was placed on maintaining the hardware that was in place, a time-consuming task when you’re talking about multiple servers. So what companies discovered was that they were dedicating a large percentage of their resources to preventing catastrophes rather than promoting opportunities.

Virtualization has shifted the way in which companies manage their IT needs, opening the door for innovation while still maintaining and securing the operating systems and applications that a company utilizes on a daily basis. Essentially companies can eliminate the multiple server approach and run virtual machines on a single physical machine, maximizing capacity and storage space in a safe and secure manner.

It is secure because that one physical machine is able to partition off space for multiple operating systems and applications so that if a problem arises with one of these things it won’t affect any of the others that are on the physical machine. That takes care of the security and as for efficiency; all of the virtual machines on the physical machine share the resources of that physical computer, something that couldn’t be done when managing multiple servers.

While virtualization has dramatically lowered operating costs within companies and promoted innovation and development from their IT departments there are issues concerning the technology that need to be kept in check. Because a company now has multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine there can be issues with I/O bandwidth bottlenecks due to accelerated fragmentation, the competition for shared I/O resources among the virtual machines is not always prioritized across the platform, and virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted- leaving free space that is wasted.

These issues are something that can easily be handled with the right software, software that acts as a virtual platform disk optimizer that can reduce the bottlenecks and create a faster and more efficient computing platform as well as frees up vital storage resources by eliminating issue of wasted free space. Companies like Diskeeper have been designing solutions for the advancement of virtualization and by utilizing their software businesses can benefit from all the opportunities that virtualization offers, namely greater efficiency and productivity within their organization. Taking the step to advance you’re business through virtualization is critical, just make sure your steps are on solid ground with software solutions like V-locity from Diskeeper.