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.