Burbank, CA 4/8/2011 4:15:32 AM
News / Business

Virtualization Infrastructures Alternative to Costly Multiple Server Environments, Protect Technology with Virtualization Software

Virtualization has become one of the most significant advancements in technology for businesses trying to compete in an increasingly stressful environment. Companies have been in desperate need for a legitimate solution to their predicament, a way to control costs while at the same time increase their business. As difficult as this may sound, the advancement of virtualization as an information management system has provided the answer to the dilemma.

What virtualization has done is provide companies an out from their inefficient and costly multiple server environments that have essentially kept business stagnant. This old way of managing information has become a paralyzing force, halting growth and development within a company while also wasting time and resources. For any company that continues to depend upon the multiple server environment platform the chances of achieving costs control and improved business are extremely slim.

The reason this is true is simple, multiple server environments are extremely cumbersome and require constant attention by IT admins just to keep things operating properly. In a multiple server environment a company places their operating systems and applications on separate servers, an expensive endeavor in its own right. With these operating systems and applications spread across multiple servers IT admins have to treat each server individually, meaning every time they do basic tasks like updates, recoveries, archiving, or backups they have to repeat the process on each server; a serious drain on IT time.

Of course with all of this information placed on different servers there is also the issue of underutilized storage capacity, simply put companies are wasting a lot of money on servers that are using a fraction of their storage capabilities. This means that not only do companies spend a great deal of money on purchasing these underutilized servers but then they also dish out even more money to keep them running, not exactly the most prudent way to run a business.

On top of the cost issue associated with multiple server environments is the waste of resources that this platform entails. Companies don’t rely on their IT admins to spend a great deal of time on basic tasks, they rely on them to innovate and develop; something they just can’t do in a multiple server environment. Too much time is spent maintaining and troubleshooting, ultimately leaving a company in a position where they can’t move forward.

Now virtualization platforms have changed all of this, giving companies the ability to place all of their operating systems, applications, and other information on a single physical machine that can then be accessed by different virtual computers. These virtual computers share the resources of the physical machine which allows them to run different operating systems and applications at different times.

So, instead of having to spend all of that money on underutilized servers a company simply places their information on one physical machine and that information can be accessed on different computers at any time. What virtualization means for IT admins is that when they do have to carry out the basic tasks of updates, recoveries, archiving, and backups it can be done in almost no time because they are dealing with a single machine, not multiple servers.

What virtualization also brings is added security to those operating systems and applications because they are stored in separate environments on the physical machine. What this means is that if there was a problem with one of those operating systems or applications it wouldn’t affect the other operating systems or applications because they were protected.

In order for companies to get the most out of their virtualization infrastructure they must make sure they safeguard their platforms from issues that could arise, 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.

Fortunately safeguarding these virtualization platforms from these issues doesn’t require a company to dedicate a large portion of their budget or hire a team of IT experts, it simply requires the installation of virtualization software and when it comes to virtualization software there is none better than V-locity from Diskeeper Corporation.

What Diskeeper Corporation has created with V-locity is virtualization software that acts as a virtual disk optimizer, delivering background optimization which in turn improves the operability and functionality of the virtualization platform. What this means is that V-locity is capable of eliminating the issues that could cause problems for a virtualization infrastructure, tackling 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.

As much as virtualization offers a company in terms of improved productivity and efficiency along with cost cutting measures the technology must be protected from the problems that do exist. Installing virtualization can ensure a company that the improvements they are desperate to achieve can become a reality.