Burbank, CA 3/22/2011 10:49:27 PM
News / Business

Boosting the Performance and Maximizing the Benefits of Virtual Platforms Requires Virtualization Software

The adoption of virtualization platforms as a solution to the out-dated practice of managing multiple servers and wasting valuable resources continues to be embraced by a number of companies. As more companies face tighter budgets, cutbacks, layoffs, etc. they continue to look for alternatives to their current operational practices and because virtualization is capable of improving efficiency and productivity within the workplace it has quickly become the cornerstone of a new way of business.

Virtualization has essentially revolutionized how companies manage their business, eliminating the cumbersome processes that IT admins endured in the multiple server environment by safely and securely positioning all of their information on a single physical computer that can be quickly accessed through the use of virtual machines.

By implementing a virtualization infrastructure and doing away with their multiple server setting a company is able to improve on at least two critical aspects of their business that are essential to growth, saving money and cultivating innovation.

The cost of managing multiple servers is significantly more than just the expense of each machine, it involves payroll for the IT admins charged with keeping the system functioning, it involves the costs of powering those servers, it involves the costs associated with wasted space on the under-utilized servers, it involves the costs associated with lost business caused by maintaining an inefficient manner of operating a business. These costs quickly add up and it’s reasonable to assume that they contribute significantly to a company’s need to make budget cuts, implement pay freezes, scale back their operations, or simply layoff employees.

Companies that move from their multiple server environment to a virtualization infrastructure eliminate those costs almost immediately. With everything on one physical computer IT admins no longer have to spend time maintaining several servers or search for problems that are slowing down a business. It is estimated that more than half a company’s budget for IT is dedicated to simple maintenance of their servers; virtualization requires a fraction of the maintenance needs, meaning an IT department has more resources for other areas of importance.

Virtualization platforms also eliminate the costs associated with simply powering under-utilized servers. Most companies that operate multiple servers place a single operating system or application on each server, leaving the majority of space on that machine free. This is done to protect those operating systems and applications in the event a problem occurs on one of the servers but purchasing servers, maintaining those servers, and paying to keep them powered counter the security benefits. With virtualization all of those operating systems and applications can be safely stored on the one physical computer and placed in their own secure area, meaning if something were to go wrong with one of the systems or applications it wouldn’t affect the others.

Reducing the costs for companies even more, through virtualization platforms each virtual machine is able to share the resources of the one physical computer across multiple environments, meaning different virtual machines are capable of running different operating systems and applications on the same physical computer, improving efficiency and productivity.

Perhaps the most meaningful benefit of virtualization is its ability to free up IT admins to innovate and develop. It is only through innovation and development that a company can evolve and this is exactly what virtualization encourages. The technology removes the burden of maintaining and troubleshooting multiple servers and makes it easier for IT to complete basic tasks like backup, archiving, and recovering as well as managing, securing, and upgrading desktops and notebooks that are used by the company.

Knowing that the solution to cutting costs, improving efficiency, sparking productivity, and encouraging innovation and development is virtualization there really is no reason a company should ignore the technology. Once they have adopted virtualization, and for any company that has already moved to a virtualization infrastructure, ensuring that it is performing up to its abilities is essential. Virtualization can obviously provide a number of benefits but the technology still requires that IT attention. Fortunately that attention is nowhere near the attention needed in a multiple server environment, it can be as simple as installing virtualization software that is capable of acting as a virtual platform disk optimizer to deliver invisible background optimization. This is exactly what the virtualization software from Diskeeper Corporation, V-locity, is designed to accomplish.

Installing virtualization software like V-locity can easily remedy issues related to I/O bandwidth bottlenecks, virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources, and problems related to virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow but do not resize when data is deleted. V-locity handles the bottleneck issue by creating a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives without the need to add additional hardware, it eliminates competition for shared I/O resources by coordinating resource usage, and solves the virtual disk “bloat” problem by compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

At the end of the day virtualization platforms have provided companies with a brighter future for their business and adopting this infrastructure can put them on a path to growth. Just as important as implementing the technology is ensuring that it is always performing at the level it is capable of, this makes virtualization software like V-locity a must. Take care of your virtualization platform and that positive future could be very real.