To position itself for success a company must find the
ways to get the most out of their money. Executives are constantly
making decisions based on expected returns on investment and overall
costs of the project. In a lot of cases the focus on costs and trying to
keep spending down leads to bad decisions making that can cost the
company money and damage the overall brand. Before making any decisions
that could be harmful in the long run a company should examine its
business management system to find ways to create extra money.
The first step in finding extra money is figuring out where money is
being wasted. It is very common for companies to waste money on multiple
server environments. These environments place unneeded work on IT
administrators and cause backups throughout the company. These backups
leave employees unable to focus their time on expanding the business and
streamlining operations.
Multiple server environments require that information be stored on
separate servers with each serving hosting an operating system or
application. Each of these servers must be backed up, maintained and
updated by an IT admin. With so many different servers to take care of,
maintenance becomes the dominant feature in an admins day, taking up the
majority of their time and leaving them with little extra time to focus
on other projects. Having one application or operating system on each
server also creates servers with wasted space that is not used to house
any information.
In addition to taking up time and creating unused space multiple server
environments also need to be housed separately and every time an
addition to the system is made another server must be added. The costs
add up quickly in these environments. Companies seem to view these
expenses as a necessary evil because they have always used this setup to
store their data.
Many companies have realized the waste that is created in multiple
server environments and switched to using virtualization platforms. A
virtualization platform lets a company condense all of their information
onto one server. Operating systems and applications can be stored in
one place instead of across different machines. The information can then
be accessed by different virtual computer that share the single
server’s resources. The use of only one server allows IT admins to focus
their time on other projects and be more productive. They are freed
from the repetitive maintenance caused by multiple machines.
Some companies fear that by keeping their operating systems and
applications on one server they are sacrificing the security that comes
by spreading information across several machines. Virtualization
actually provides the same level of protection as a multiple server
environment. The data stored are kept in different secure areas. Each
area is separate from the others so that if there is a problem with one
application or operating system the others remain unharmed and useable.
With any advance in technology there are drawbacks. A company that has
switched to a virtualization platform may experience issues 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. These problems are easily avoidable.
Protecting a virtualization platform from these issues is as simple as
installing
virtualization software. Software like V-locity from
Diskeeper Corporation prevents the problems that are most common in
virtualization platforms. V-locity acts as a virtual disk optimizer and
performs background operations to enhance the system’s performance.
V-locity prevents bottleneck issues by creating a fast and efficient
computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives
without installing additional hardware. It coordinates resource usage to
eliminate competition for I/O resources and the virtual disk is
compacted to prevent disk “bloat.” Once the software has been installed
these problems are not an issue and your virtualization platform will
run quickly and securely.
Companies using multiple server environments create large amounts of
waste without ever realizing it. They are keeping the IT employees from
fully utilizing their skills to help the company and creating extra
expenses by not maximizing the usefulness of their existing servers.
Switching to a virtualization platform and keeping it protected with
virtualization software will allow companies to eliminate waste and
focus on the most important projects.
