Lots of companies make important decisions based on one
important factor, how it affects their bottom line. The constant
struggle to keep costs low while expanding the business is the driving
force behind the ways that companies choose to make decisions. Trying to
effectively manage both of these interests can lead to poor decision
making and hurt the company in the end. Companies should effectively
investigate their business management systems before making any
decisions about the future.
Lots of companies have places where they spend unnecessary money.
Running a multiple server environment is a prime example. Management
systems like these can actually create more work for IT administrators
and lead to wasted time.
In multiple server environments companies are required to put their
information on separate machines. Operating systems and applications are
spread across several physical servers, each server needing individual
upkeep. IT admins must maintain each server, create backup data, and
maintain their efficiency. Doing all these chores keeps them from
focusing on other essential tasks and limits their productivity.
Multiple server environments also require expenses in purchasing,
maintaining and housing all of the separate machines. Every additional
server requires another investment of time and resources. This expensive
practice can keep money from flowing to other departments in the
company, hurting the quality of the work as well as damaging moral.
To make the bottom line and the multiple server environment work
together companies employ temporary fixes. They shuffle money from one
department to another so that everything works out when it needs to.
This practice does not provide a long term solution to the problem; it
simply avoids it for the time being. The problem will arise again unless
actions are taken to provide long-term relief. Realizing this, many
companies have switched to a virtualization infrastructure.
A virtualization infrastructure allows companies to put all of their
data on one server instead of spreading it out across multiple machines.
The information can then be accessed by different virtual computers all
sharing the resources of the lone server. This means that IT admins
only need to focus on the maintenance of one server, leaving them free
to devote time elsewhere.
Virtualization infrastructures provide the same level of protection that
multiple server environments can. Information like operating systems
and applications are stored in separate secure areas on the server. If a
problem occurs in one area the other areas remain safe and can still be
accessed.
A company with a virtualization infrastructure can face several
challenges. I/O bandwidth bottlenecks from accelerated fragmentation,
virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources not being properly
prioritized across the platform and virtual disks set to dynamically
grow not resizing when data is needed can all occur if steps are not
taken to protect the infrastructure.
Luckily protecting a virtualization infrastructure is not overly
expensive and does not take a lot of time. A company should install
virtualization software on the infrastructure. Virtualization software
like V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation prevents these problems from
occurring happening. V-locity acts as a virtual disk optimizer to
deliver background optimization that improves the functionality and
operability of a virtualization infrastructure.
V-locity stops the bottleneck problem by creating a fast and efficient
computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives
without installing additional hardware. It coordinates resource usage to
eliminate competition for I/O resources and will compact virtual disk
space to prevent “bloating” on the disk. With the system running free of
these issues the IT admins are able to devote their time to more
pressing matters and work more efficiently.
Companies can now stop shuffling funds and trying to make their bottom
line look good with temporary solutions to long range problems.
Virtualization infrastructures protected with virtualization software
offer long-term solutions.
