How Can Virtualization Benefit Your Business
Virtualization is all about finding a way to run your workloads more effectively by combining the resources running them. This is typically done by having just one server to run several different workloads or applications rather than each one having it’s own server. It’s also very common to consolidate storage and applications as well as the actual servers.
One of the main benefits of virtualization is the money it can save any organization. For example the overall operating costs will be quickly reduced. If you’re running multiple servers you’re going to be spending a lot of money on energy bills. Firstly you’ve got the actual expense of running these servers and the power they’re taking up. virtualization means you’re no longer having to power quite so many servers. Another energy saving you’ll be making is the reduction in cooling costs. Your servers will get very hot quickly because they’re always running. In order to maintain them for as long as possible you’re going to have to be pumping cold air into your data center. Your data center won’t be as big is you start to virtualize your servers so you won’t be needing so much power to keep them cool. Another area you’ll start to see a reduction in costs is in the overall maintenance costs. You no longer need to spend resources maintaining these servers. Other areas of the business can be focused on instead.
There will still be plenty of areas for your IT staff to focus on. After all they’ve got a new cloud storage system. Now there’s several applications and many different workloads all running off one server. In order to ensure your new virtualization strategy works they’ll have a lot to focus on. You’ll also have to ensure you get user buy in from the rest of your staff within the business. A new virtual server can be created with the click of a button so it’s vital you’re only setting up new servers when they’re actually needed.
December 16 2010 11:00 am | Business: Productivity