Corporate executives must constantly focus on maximizing
their company’s output by promoting growth and keeping costs to a
minimum. Many times the need to save outweighs the desire to expand and
the company strives to grow while maintaining the same operating budget.
To do this funding from other departments can be focused towards
expansion. Reducing the operating budget while trying to maintain the
same output can lower morale and damage the company over time. To combat
this problem a company should examine its business management system
before making any potentially harmful decisions.
One source of excess spending for a company can be a multiple server
environment. These environments can create repetitive tasks for
employees and create slowdowns throughout the company leaving employees
unable to focus free time in more productive, and lucrative, ways.
In a multiple server environment a company spreads their information,
operating systems and applications across several different servers.
Each one of these servers must then be maintained, backed up and updated
by an IT administrator. These tasks are repetitive and leave the IT
admin unable to use their skills to help the company in other ways.
A multiple server environment also requires that a company purchase each
server and provide the space to house them. This quickly becomes
expensive as the company grows and more servers are required, taking up
more space and creating additional costs. Some companies view this as
necessary because it is the way that they have always done it but many
companies are combating the problem by switching to a virtualization
infrastructure.
A virtualization infrastructure lets the company condense all of their
data onto one single machine. Operating systems, applications and
information are no longer spread across a network but are kept in one
space. The information on the server can then be accessed by virtual
computers sharing the server’s resources. This setup frees the IT admins
more time to devote elsewhere.
Virtualization infrastructures also provide the same level of protection
as multiple server environments. The data on the servers are stored in
several different areas. Each of these areas is secure and separate from
the others so if an area is corrupted the other information is still
accessible while the problem is being fixed.
After switching to a virtualization infrastructure a company should
protect their investment. 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 are all
problems common to unprotected virtualization platforms.
Protecting a virtualization infrastructure does not require a large
investment of time or money. All a company needs to do is install
virtualization software on their infrastructure. Virtualization
software, like V-locity from the
Diskeeper Corporation, works to prevent
the problems that can occur on the infrastructure. Acting as a virtual
disk optimizer, V-locity will perform background optimization to improve
the performance of your system.
Virtualization software prevents 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.” With the system protected the
IT admins do not need to worry about fixing these issues and are able
to be more productive.
Companies trying to find a way to balance their desire to expand their
business with the need to keep costs from rising should always examine
the current structure of their business, starting with the business
management system. A virtualization infrastructure running
virtualization software will help a company save money and help
employees use their time to work towards the company’s mutual goals.
