Virtualization Infrastructure the Road to Future Growth and Development for Companies, Ensure Stability with Virtualization Software

Sometimes growing your business can be a simple matter of changing how your existing infrastructure operates. Rather than just accepting that because business has been conducted in such a manner for so long it’s better to leave it the way that it is, successful companies are constantly asking how they can improve on what they are doing. Because of these questions they find more efficient and productive methods of running their business, which ultimately keeps them ahead of their competition. These successful companies fully understand that business is constantly changing which means the way they operate must reflect those changes.

There was a time when a multiple server environment represented an advancement in how a company managed their information. Unfortunately what many of the companies soon realized was that managing these multiple servers was becoming a growing problem. Soon enough IT admins were spending more time maintaining and troubleshooting these multiple servers rather than on innovation and development and when that happened growth stopped, and on top of that the company was losing money and wasting resources.

Companies were losing money and wasting resources for a number of reasons. More often than not they would put a single operating system or application on an individual server, utilizing a fraction of that server’s storage capacity. Not only was the storage capacity of the server underutilized, which costs a company money, but it still required the attention of IT admins who had to carry out basic tasks like updates, archiving, recovery, and backup for each individual server.

These servers hosted a single operating system or application as a security measure, ensuring that if something were to go wrong with one of these operating systems or applications then it wouldn’t affect the rest of them. It was a logical practice but also an incredibly expensive practice because not only are servers expensive to purchase but they are expensive to keep running and when they are only using a fraction of their storage capacity that’s a lot of wasted money.

This is something that a lot of companies began to take notice of and when they began to look for a solution they came to realize that virtualization platforms could provide all of the benefits that multiple server environments offered but at a dramatically reduced cost, both monetarily and developmentally.

By enabling a company to store all of their operating systems and applications on a single physical machine that allows virtual computers access to this information virtualization has essentially eliminated the costs associated with the purchase and maintenance of a multiple server environment. This is true because the virtual computers tied to a virtual infrastructure all share the same resources of the physical machine, meaning they can access different operating systems and applications at different times.

Of course the concern over security was the main selling point of the multiple server environments but with virtualization the operating systems and applications are each stored in their own protected space on the physical machine which ensures that if something did happen to one of those operating systems or applications it wouldn’t cause the rest to crash.

While virtualization is capable of changing the direction of a company there are issues that a company must be aware of when they adopt their virtualization infrastructure. Issues like 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 can all crop up. Of course these issues only crop up when the health of the virtualization infrastructure is ignored.

All it takes to ensure the health of the virtualization platforms is virtualization software, it may sound too easy but it really is that simple. It’s that simple because virtualization software like V-locity, designed by Diskeeper Corporation, solves each of the issues outlined above. V-locity systematically 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.

Virtualization is nothing less than the technological advancement capable of getting companies through the difficult economic climate they are now in. What company can afford to underutilize their servers, waste valuable dollars maintaining and troubleshooting those multiple servers, and put innovation and development on hold because they just don’t have the time? The best thing these companies can do is move forward with virtualization and when they take that step they need to ensure their infrastructure is always operating at its highest level and virtualization software is that guarantee.