Virtualization Platforms Key to Saving Companies Money, Eliminating Waste Associated with Multiple Server Environments

Most companies are facing the pressure of what appears to be an impossible task, cutting costs while improving efficiency and productivity. While this goal may appear difficult the reality is if a company is cutting the right costs then improvement in the areas of efficiency and productivity will occur almost naturally. The key is in identifying the right costs to cut and the most important costs that need to be eliminated are those that are contributing to waste. That may sound like an obvious place to start but if a company doesn’t know where they are wasting money then they will almost certainly continue to see their bottom line affected.

Perhaps the most significant portion of waste inside a company is related to how they manage their information. As much as companies try to evolve with the times and adapt to changes within their industry they often try to make these changes with an out-dated information management system, something that not only prevents growth within a business but also pushes them further behind their competition, costing them a considerable amount of money.

This out-dated information management system is the multiple server environment that companies still rely upon for their daily operations. So much of company waste can be attributed to practices that are done simply because that’s the way they have been done and until this mindset is smashed and a new way of doing things is examined this waste will continue.

While the multiple server environment was at one time an advancement in information management its time has passed, giving way to virtualization platforms. The reason virtualization has become such a dominant force in business is simple, it saves a company money while improving their efficiency and productivity- the goal that every business is now facing pressure to achieve.

With a virtualization infrastructure a company can eliminate the costly practice of purchasing and maintaining multiple servers, a strain on any IT budget. Virtualization takes all of the operating systems, applications, and other information that has been stored on those multiple servers and places them on a single physical machine which can then be accessed through different virtual computers. Because these virtual computers share the resources of that one physical machine they are capable of running different operating systems and applications at different times.

The significance of this step forward in technology can’t be ignored. In a multiple server environment all of these operating systems and applications are, for the most part, stored on separate servers. This means that whenever an IT admin needs to do basic tasks like updates, archiving, recoveries, or backups they need to move from one server to the next, a process that can consume a considerable amount of time.

On top of the simple maintenance issues is the problem of troubleshooting in a multiple server environment, with everything spread across a number of machines it can be difficult to identify exactly where a problem has occurred.

Because virtualization platforms place all of the information on one machine those basic tasks are just that, basic; and identifying where a problem has occurred is easy because IT admins don’t have to search through multiple servers, they have a single machine that is hosting everything.

As important as eliminating the costs associated with maintaining multiple servers is, the real value of virtualization and what makes it the ideal platform for a company to improve its efficiency and productivity is the time it gives IT admins to develop and innovate new ideas for the growth of business. No longer bogged down by routine tasks IT admins can do what they do best, create, and that is the key to staying ahead of the curve.

Virtualization is an advancement in technology and while it’s a tool that can quickly drive a company’s business it’s also a tool that needs to remain in good condition. It’s a simple matter of respecting its health and taking the simple steps necessary to ensure it continues to perform up to the levels of which it’s capable. Failing to do this can lead to a number of issues which include 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.

If a company is capable of recognizing the impact that virtualization platforms can have on their business then they are almost certainly willing to take the precautionary steps necessary to protect their new infrastructure. This can be done with virtualization software, an easy step that will ensure the integrity of a virtualization infrastructure is maintained.

Installing virtualization software like V-locity from Diskeeper Corporation is a company’s best bet to getting the most out of their virtualization platforms. V-locity tackles each of the issues mentioned above, 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, eliminate competition for shared I/O resources by coordinating resource usage, and solve the virtual disk “bloat” problem by compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.

When companies don’t get overwhelmed with the idea of cutting costs while improving efficiency and productivity they can see the obvious areas where they are wasting money. Once that area has been identified it just becomes a matter of replacing the old way of doing things with a more favorable system. This is exactly what virtualization affords, and virtualization software is the insurance policy that keeps delivering results.