There is a constant struggle in the business world to
balance expenses with profits. Sometimes it seems like the only way to
grow a business is to spend more money and spending more money leads to a
decrease in the company's overall profit margin. Many times companies
seek to combat these rising costs by reducing spending in other areas to
focus on expansion. Many of the resulting decisions can harm the
company in the long-run by leaving the company shorthanded where funds
were cut. Before eliminating spending in areas that are counted on to
perform, companies should examine their business infrastructure and
their business management system.
Many companies have business management systems that do not maximize the
company's resources. Multiple server environments, for instance,
provide tremendous wastes of company time and IT administrators skills
by creating unnecessary work for them to do.
In multiple server environments companies put their operating systems
and applications on several different physical machines. Each of the
machines must then be maintained by an IT admin. The servers must be
backed up, updated and maintained individually. These processes take
time and must be done multiple times by the IT admins in charge or the
upkeep of the servers, leaving them unable to focus their attention on
more productive tasks.
Extraneous costs are also caused by the need to purchase, maintain and
house the physical servers. This can become expensive as companies add
more servers to their system. With every additional server added there
is less money to devote to other areas for development and expansion of
the business. Eventually the lack of funding can lower company moral and
even damage the brand.
Cutting spending is a temporary solution to a larger problem caused by
multiple server environments. The bottom line looks good in the
short-term but over time the problem will continue to arise and must be
addressed each time by cutting more and more spending. More and more
companies are finding the long-term solution by switching to a
virtualization infrastructure.
Virtualization infrastructures eliminate the need to house information
on different machines. The operating systems and applications are all
condensed onto one physical machine that can then be accessed by
different virtual computers that share the resources of the single
server. This practice does away with spending to house and maintain
multiple servers and frees the IT admins to spend their time working
more productively.
Virtualization offers the same security that multiple server
environments do by housing operating systems and applications in their
own secure areas on the server. If one of the areas is compromised the
other areas are unaffected and can continue to be accessed.
Once a company has switched to a virtualization infrastructure they must
take the proper steps to maintain it. A system that does not have
proper security can experience I/O bandwidth bottlenecks from
accelerated fragmentation, virtual machine competition for shared I/O
resources not being prioritized properly across the platform and virtual
disks set to dynamically grow not resizing when data is deleted.
Protecting a virtualization infrastructure does not come with a huge
time or money commitment. A company only needs to install
virtualization
software on the system. Virtualization software like V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation prevents the problems that arise in virtualization
infrastructures. V-locity improves the functionality and operability of
the infrastructure by acting as a virtual disk optimizer and delivering
background optimization.
V-locity prevents bottleneck by making fast and fast and efficient
computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives
without creating the need for new hardware. The software coordinates
resource usage to eliminate competition for I/O resources and will
compact virtual disk space and prevents disk "bloat." Preventing these
issues from arising frees IT admins to do more with their time and not
worry about problems occurring on the infrastructure.
By utilizing a virtualization infrastructure and virtualization software
companies do not need to use temporary solutions to reach their goals.
Long-term solutions allow for company growth and an increase in business
rather than hiding the problem until the next fiscal report is due.
