Companies are currently experiencing a lot of pressure to
protect their revenues while lowering expenses. These companies need to
enhance their productivity and efficiency, a daunting task for any
company, but the problem has a simple solution if the company assesses
the right areas of their business. Finding wasteful spending and
streamlining the processes that contribute are a sure way to lower
spending while significantly impacting company profitability.
One area that is often overlooked is a company’s information management
system. Companies are always trying to adapt and adjust for changing
industry standards but do not examine the way that they manage their
data, leaving them lagging behind the competition and ultimately costing
them a significant amount of money.
The old model for information management, multiple server environments,
is outdated and companies still rely on them every day to conduct
business operations. Companies have stuck with this model because it is
the setup that they have always used and a lot of wasteful spending can
be directly attributed to this train of thought. Unless a company
changes its way of thinking the waste is bound to continue.
The multiple server environment has passed the torch as the optimal
information management system to virtualization infrastructures.
Virtualization infrastructures have become the best option because they
allow companies to save money while improving efficiency and driving
productivity, goals every business hopes to achieve.
Using a virtualization infrastructure allows a company to forgo
purchasing and maintaining multiple machines that create a strain on any
IT budget. Virtualization takes the operating systems, information and
applications from the individual machines and condenses it on a single
physical server that can be accessed by several different virtual
terminals. These virtual terminals share the resources house on the
server and are capable of running different applications and operating
systems at different times.
It is a significant advancement that the operating systems and
applications can be used on these virtual terminals rather as opposed to
being stored on separate machines. Whenever an IT administrator has to
perform tasks like backups, recoveries, archiving or updates in a
multiple server environment they must individually address each server.
In addition to maintenance troubleshooting on multiple servers is
problematic. The IT admin must spend considerable time locating the
source of the problem before even beginning to fix the problem.
With all of the information stored in one place, virtualization makes
these tasks quick and easy; even locating a problem in the system takes
less time because of the central location of all the necessary
information. Having all of your information on one server saves time.
Saving money by eliminating the high costs of multiple server
environments is important but the virtualization adds more value by
allowing IT admins to spend their time working on new ideas that can
help improve the efficiency of the company and grow business. The time
that used to be dedicated to basic tasks can be spent creating solutions
to problems that plague productivity and stay ahead of the curve.
Like any advance in technology a virtualization infrastructure must be
properly maintained to ensure that it works well for a long time. A
simple process of respecting the technology and protecting the
investment is all that it takes to make sure the system remains a viable
cost-saving solution. If it is not properly cared for there are a
number of problems that can arise including I/O bandwidth bottlenecks
due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine
competition for shared I/O resources not effectively being prioritized
across the platform, and virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not
resize when data is deleted, resulting in free space being wasted.
Recognizing that problems can arise is the first step to preventing them
from happening on your infrastructure. An easy way to ensure the health
of a virtualization infrastructure is to install
virtualization
software.
Virtualization software like V-locity from the
Diskeeper Corporation is
the best way to maintain a virtualization system and get the maximum
value out of the new setup. V-locity eliminates all of the
aforementioned issues, eliminating the bottleneck issue by creating a
faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and
provisioning initiatives without the need to add additional hardware,
eliminating competition for shared I/O resources by coordinating
resource usage, and solve the virtual disk “bloat” problem by compacting
the virtual disk. This eliminates waste and prevents IT admins from
being overwhelmed.
Companies that take the time to examine their internal processes can
find the obvious ways to create savings. Once they find the central
issues it is simply a matter of changing from one way of doing things to
a newer, better system. Virtualization is this newer better system and
virtualization software is the best way to protect the investment.
