Burbank, CA 3/24/2011 11:06:59 PM
News / Business

Virtualization Platforms Pushing Companies to New Business Opportunities, Virtualization Software Ensures You Remain on Stable Ground

Adaptability is one of those qualities that every success company possesses, an ability to adjust the way they operate their business to better fit with the times. These companies are able to recognize that trying to move forward while implementing an outdated method of managing their business is a losing battle that will ultimately leave them behind their competition. Instead of resisting change these successful companies embrace it, putting them at the forefront of their industry and ensuring their customers and clients that they are actively pursuing improvements which will translate into stronger relationships.

Sometimes these transitions into change can produce incredible benefits for a company, nothing less than revolutionizing their business as it improves efficiency, productivity, resource management, innovation, development, and cuts costs. That may sound like a lot but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg when a company sheds their archaic multiple server environment and integrates a virtualization infrastructure into their business operations.

Virtualization platforms have become one of the most effective ways for a business to not only survive the difficult economic climate that exists today but actually thrive. The reason this is true is because it can dramatically reduce unnecessary costs, eliminate waste, encourage efficiency and productivity, and free up IT admins to do what they do best- concentrate on innovative ways to improve and develop the business of the company.

These benefits are simply not possible with a multiple server environment that demands constant attention from IT admins. In these multiple server environments information is spread across a number of servers, servers that host a single operating system or application. This distribution of information across different machines not only makes it more difficult for IT admins to maintain or troubleshoot issues; it also wastes a considerable amount of money. Because these servers are hosting just a single operating system or application they are utilizing a fraction of their storage capacity, leaving free space that goes unused. On top of that, keeping those servers running is an expensive practice in and of itself.

At one time the multiple server approach to managing information was seen as the most effective way to secure and protect data. If something were to go wrong with one application or an operating system then it wouldn’t affect the others because they were on different servers. While the intentions of securing and protecting the integrity of information were necessary it came at a significant cost as most IT admins found themselves spending more than half their time just maintaining these multiple machines, leaving the little time to do anything else. Essentially these IT departments were spending their day running on a treadmill and by the end of the day they were tired and still in the same place.

The advancement of virtualization platforms has changed the landscape and made it possible for IT admins to quickly carry out the basic tasks like updates, backup, archiving and recovery, tasks that at one time encompassed most of their day, freeing them up for more valuable projects. What virtualization allows a company to do is consolidate all of their information onto one physical computer, meaning their operating systems, applications, etc., and this information can then be accessed by virtual machines which share the resources of that physical computer.

By consolidating all of the information onto one physical computer a company immediately eliminates the costs of managing multiple servers as well as eliminates the wasted hours spent on maintaining those servers. The fear that if everything is placed on a single machine a company is more vulnerable if a problem exists with an operating system or application is remedied by virtualization. While the operating systems and applications are placed on one physical machine they are secured in their own space which means if there is a problem with any one of them it is isolated and can’t affect the performance of the others.

IT admins will attest to the benefits of virtualization platforms, especially when comparing their capabilities to the old multiple server environment. That doesn’t mean that virtualization is immune to problems. Among the most common issues that can affect a virtualization platform include I/O bandwidth bottlenecks fast due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources not effectively being prioritized across the platform, and virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted, resulting in free space being wasted.

Those are the most common issues and of course Diskeeper Corporation has the most effective solution, virtualization software that is capable of acting as a virtual platform disk optimizer, delivering invisible background optimization. Nothing can improve the operability or deliver the desired results of a virtual platform like virtualization software and Diskeeper has created the perfect product in V-locity, virtualization software that eliminates 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, V-locity also 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.

Adapting to change can be an intimidating process for some companies yet it is a necessary step if they are to grow and succeed. Virtualization is a giant leap forward and can push a company to the next level but it is essential that their virtual platforms are maintained properly and this can be done with something as simple as virtualization software.