A successful company must always find new ways to protect
their profits while continuing to expand the scope of their business.
This can create a conflict of interests as expansion and growth require
great commitments of both time and money. More people but be hired and
more money must be spent on promotion of products and services. When it
comes time to choose between the bottom line and future growth, many
decisions can actually harm the company rather than push it forward. To
avoid making these mistakes a company should closely examine its
business management system to see if they are wasting resources.
Multiple server environments are one way that a company can spend
unnecessary time and money. These environments can slow down operations
and create wasted time for employees leaving them unable to focus on the
tasks that will help the company grow.
In a multiple server environment a company places their information,
operating systems and applications on different servers that are all
maintained by IT administrators. Each individual machine must be backed
up, updated and maintained separately from the others. This forces the
IT admins to spend their time doing repetitive tasks and leaves them
with less time to devote to more productive matters.
Multiple server environments are expensive to set up. Each server must
be purchased, stored and maintained independently creating additional
expenses and necessitating additional spending each time a server is
added. Many companies are solving this problem by switching to a
virtualization infrastructure.
Virtualization infrastructures let companies condense all of the data
that they are storing. Operating systems, applications and information
are all stored on a single server rather than spread across several
different machines. The information can then be accessed by different
virtual computers that share the resources of the server. This gives IT
admins fewer tasks involved with maintaining the servers and allows them
to focus their attention elsewhere.
Virtualization infrastructures provide the same level of security that
companies have come to expect from multiple server environments. The
information stored on a virtualization infrastructure is kept it
separate secure areas of the server. If one area experiences a problem
the rest of the information will be kept safe and remain accessible.
After switching to a virtualization infrastructure a company should make
sure that they protect the server from harm. . If the infrastructure is
left unprotected it can experience problems like 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 deleted. Luckily it is not very expensive to provide the
necessary protection.
A company should install
virtualization software on their infrastructure
to prevent the problems that can occur. Virtualization software like
V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation prevents the problems from ever
happening by acting as a virtual disk optimizer and performing
background optimization. This background optimization will improve the
functionality and operability of the system.
Virtualization software eliminates bottleneck issues by creating a fast
and efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning
initiatives without installing additional hardware. Resource usage is
coordinated to eliminate competition for I/O resources and the virtual
disk is compacted to prevent disk “bloat.” Protecting the infrastructure
from these issues allows the IT admins to use their time to be more
productive.
Companies trying to balance expenses with growth should look at how
their business management systems are set up. Using a virtualization
infrastructure with virtualization software can provide immediate
benefits with fewer expenses on equipment and less time devoted to
protecting and maintaining multiple machines.
