A successful business must always find ways to get the
most out of their money. Executives must constantly make decisions based
on expected returns on investment and overall costs of projects. In
many cases focusing on overall costs and trying to keep spending down
leads to bad decisions that harm the company’s brand and damage employee
morale. To find ways to create extra money a company should examine its
business management system before making any decisions that could do
harm to their reputation.
The first step is to find wasteful spending in the company. One of the
most ways companies create wasteful spending is by running a multiple
server environment. These environments create extra work for your IT
administrators and can cause slowdowns throughout the company. These
slowdowns leave employees with little to no time to devote to expanding
the business.
In a multiple server environment information is stored on different
servers. Operating systems, data and applications are not stored in the
same place but are spread out across different physical machines. Each
of these servers has to be maintained, backed up and updated by an IT
admin. These repetitive jobs take up a lot of their time and leave them
unable to focus on tasks that generate income.
A multiple server environment also requires investing in the servers and
finding a place to house them. Costs quickly add up and increase each
time a new server is added. Companies have viewed multiple server
environments as necessary evils for years because it is the way that
they have always done it. Many companies, however, are finding a
solution by switching to virtualization infrastructures.
A virtualization infrastructure lets a company put all of their data on
one single server. Operating systems, files and applications are no
longer spread across several machines but all in the same place. The
information on the server can then be accessed by virtual computers
sharing the server’s resources. With the elimination of all but a single
server the IT admins are free to spend their time in more productive
ways.
Virtualization infrastructures actually provide the same level of
security as multiple server environments. The data on the server are
stored in different secure areas. Each area is separate from another so
if one area is compromised or corrupted the remaining information is
still accessible.
Once a company has switched to virtualization infrastructure they are
going to want to protect the investment. Some issues can arise including
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 are deleted. Luckily these problems are
easily avoidable.
Protecting a virtualization infrastructure requires the installation of
virtualization software. Virtualization software like V-locity from the
Diskeeper Corporation works to prevent the problems that are most common
to virtualization infrastructures. V-locity works as a virtual disk
optimizer to perform background operations and enhance the system’s
performance.
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.” There is no need to worry
about the infrastructure slowing down or performing poorly once the
software has been installed.
Companies that use virtualization infrastructures can reduce wasteful
spending and devote the extra money to important projects.
Virtualization helps companies consolidate time and money to focus their
energies on what matters the most to them.
