Shifting to Virtualization Platforms Improve Efficiency, Productivity, and Development within Company, Protect that Infrastructure with Virtualization Software

Recognizing the needs of your business is one thing, implementing the solutions to ensure that those needs are met can often times be another matter altogether. As it stands, most companies today are facing enormous pressure to cut costs while at the same time grow their business. This may sound like an impossible task but in truth if the right solution is put into action then that outcome could be easier than first thought.

The first thing a company should look at when addressing cost cutting measures isn’t always their payroll but rather a more detailed understanding of how their money is being spent. In most cases this understanding will reveal where money is being wasted and by eliminating this cost a company will not only save money but will likely improve efficiency and productivity. It’s a simple matter of identifying where improvements need to be made and then making those changes.

In most cases a dramatic improvement can be made when a company shifts from a multiple server environment to a virtualization infrastructure. This one step can reduce significant costs incurred by a company while enhancing their efficiency and productivity as well as stimulating a new era of development and innovation within their IT department. Virtualization has become the perfect example of when less is actually more.

An incredible amount of waste can quickly be identified when a company examines their multiple server approach to running their business. Just to keep multiple servers running involves a number of costs for a company including the money spent on powering these servers as well as the money spent on IT admins maintaining and sustaining these machines.  Conservative estimates have suggested between 50-70 percent of an IT budget goes to simple maintenance and troubleshooting issues related to a multiple server environment, those figures are an obvious indicator of waste;  a waste of money and time.

Much of the time wasted in a multiple server environment is due to the fact that companies have their operating systems and applications stored on separate servers, meaning IT has to dedicate their time to each machine on an individual basis. These servers are also being underutilized, in most cases just a fraction of their storage capacity is being occupied by the operating system or application it is hosting. Of course this was seen as necessary at one time for security purposes as IT feared that storing everything on one server would make a company vulnerable if something were to happen to that server or any of the operating systems or applications stored on it. In many ways this justified the costs associated with maintaining the multiple server environments.

With the advancement of virtualization platforms this argument no longer carries any weight because the newer technology is capable of ensuring the same level of security while significantly reducing the costs associated with the multiple server approach to operations.

What virtualization allows a company to do is place all of their information on a single physical machine which can then be accessed through multiple virtual machines. Because these virtual machines share the resources of the physical machine they can run different operating systems and applications, eliminating the need to place them on individual servers. This eliminates not only the costs associated with maintaining those multiple servers but also gives IT admins the time to concentrate on advancing development and innovation within the company.

Virtualization is able to address the issue of security in a simple manner, the multiple operating systems and applications that it hosts on a single physical machine are stored within their own protected environment, meaning that if something where to happen to one it would not affect the others.

As a cost cutting measure as well as a tool for efficiency, productivity, and development and innovation there is nothing that can make as dramatic an impact for a company as a virtualization infrastructure. To ensure that impact is sustained a company must always ensure that their virtualization platforms are operating at their highest capabilities and to make certain this is occurring they should always install virtualization software.

There are issues that virtualization encounter that can slow down its performance, issues like I/O bandwidth bottlenecks 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. These issues will crop up on virtualization platforms that have not been protected with virtualization software, meaning a company won’t get the full benefit of their virtualization infrastructure.

Solving these issues is as simple as installing virtualization software. Virtualization software like V-locity from Diskeeper Corporation, tackles the potential problems of virtualization head on. Acting as a virtual disk optimizer V-locity is able to deliver background optimization which in turn improves the functionality and operability of the virtualization infrastructure.

What V-locity is capable of doing is eliminating 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.

Taking into account the considerable waste that is associated with multiple server environments and then understanding that virtualization platforms are capable of eliminating that waste while providing the same level of security it only makes sense to adopt the newer technology. Once that technology has been embraced it stands to reason that a company would want to ensure its health and sustain its performance and that can be done with virtualization software, particularly software like V-locity.