Virtualization Software Provides Immediate Solutions to Performance Issues with Virtualization Platforms, Enhances Operability of Information Management Systems

The constant pressure to find more cost-effective and productive methods to do business continues to play a significant role in how companies operate. While this drive to improve the bottom line is certainly a worthy goal it can also trigger a number of poor decisions, decisions that are clearly short-sighted and can actually do more harm than good. When a company is looking to implement more cost-effective and productive methods to do business they should always look first at how they can improve their infrastructure, more specifically the system they rely upon to manage their business.

In many cases these systems are the primary cause for a company’s struggles, relying on something like a multiple server environment does little to promote efficiency or productivity and certainly does nothing to save company money. The reality is multiple server environments can be the reason why companies not only stay stagnant but actually move backwards.

To understand why this is the case all it takes is a closer look at what these multiple server environments entail. Companies place their operating systems and applications on individual servers that then need to be maintained by IT admins. There is no congruity within this multiple server environment so these IT admins must complete basic tasks like updates, archiving, and recoveries for each server, a time consuming practice that prevents them from focusing on areas like innovation and development.

Additionally, multiple server environments carry heavy costs financially as purchasing servers, storing the servers, and maintaining the health of servers can be an expensive endeavor. This financial strain, seen as a necessary evil by companies who utilize multiple server environments, can often lead to cuts in other areas of business like employment, production, and expansion. Not only does this cause friction within a company but it also diminishes their brand.

What is quickly discovered is that the cuts in these other areas are nothing more than a band-aid over the problem, they do nothing to solve the real issue, that real issue being an ineffective system of managing information. Rather than looking for temporary relief many companies are tackling the problem head-on and adopting a virtualization infrastructure that is capable of remedying the problems associated with multiple server environments.

Virtualization platforms enable a company to condense all of their information, operating systems and applications, onto a single physical machine and that information can then be accessed by a number of virtual computers which share the resources of the physical machine. This eliminates the need for purchasing, storing, and maintaining multiple servers and because all of the information is on one single machine IT admins can quickly carry out the basic tasks in a fraction of the time it took when dealing with multiple servers.

Making the virtualization infrastructure so valuable is the fact that it provides the same level of security that multiple server environments boast. In a virtualization infrastructure the operating systems and applications are stored in their own secure area, meaning if anything were to happen to one it wouldn’t affect all.

As significant an impact that virtualization infrastructures can have on a business for a company to truly get the benefits they must ensure that their virtual platforms are protected. 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 can all slow down the performance capabilities of virtualization.

Fortunately protecting a virtualization infrastructure doesn’t require a tremendous amount of attention or significant costs, all it takes is the installation of virtualization software. Virtualization software like V-locity from Diskeeper Corporation, is capable of tackling the potential problems of virtualization before they ever become a reality. 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.

The pressure to maintain the bottom line will always be present for companies but they don’t always have to subscribe to ineffective and counter-productive methods to meet this goal. Implementing a virtualization infrastructure and protecting that information management system with virtualization software is a concrete solution that can provide stability and growth for any company.