There are many tech buzzwords that businesses need to wrap their heads around these days – Biowearables, Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality. Many of these digital innovations cause a great deal of excitement but often fail to live up to the hype. While you may think that virtualisation should have been mentioned in this buzzword list, virtualised environments are so much more than a passing trend.
According to Gartner, the global server virtualisation market is reaching its peak. Gartner forecast that the market will grow to $5.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.7% from 2015. The beauty of well-structured virtualisation is that it brings a high degree of flexibility into your business, it generates significant cost-savings and improves scalability.
Why virtualise?
Best practice dictates that only one application should be run on each server. But for many companies this means running outdated solutions on huge racks of expensive, inefficient servers. Server virtualisation means better utilisation of your resources because you can run multiple, self-contained ‘virtual machines’ on a single physical server.
We’ve compiled a short list detailing why virtualisation is a great option for businesses looking to save space and tighten their belts.
1. Virtualisation saves hardware and running costs
If you need less hardware and devices to provide the same technology services, you’re going to cut costs. In addition to this, less hardware means less IT support, reduced energy usage and lower expenditure on maintenance. By allowing you to do more with less, virtualisation can make entire processes more efficient. When discussing hardware savings, if you do end up investing in hardware, a virtual strategy extends the life of devices and makes it easier to maintain uptime.
2. Virtualisation allows businesses to use server resources more consistently and efficiently
Remember those inefficient servers we mentioned above? Well, server virtualisation isolates applications by consolidating many virtual machines across fewer physical servers. By provisioning virtual machines with the exact amount of processing power, storage and memory required, virtualisation drastically reduces server waste.
3. The server infrastructure takes up less space onsite
Server consolidation reduces the overall footprint of your data centre. When you have fewer servers, you have fewer racks and less networking gear. This translates into less data centre floor space, which means reduced costs. This is especially true if you don’t have a data centre and opt to utilise a co-location facility.
4. Virtual servers are easier to manage, backup and restore, making it simpler to protect your business against unforeseen disasters
Downtime costs money. Just ask Delta Airlines. Most server virtualization platforms feature advancements that aid business continuity and increase uptime. High availability, live migration and storage migration are just a few ways that a virtualised environment promotes business continuity. And should a disaster occur, hardware abstraction means that you don’t have to have identical hardware on standby to match the existing production environment. Similarly, most virtualization platforms will have some software that automates the failover should something go wrong.
Our virtualisation services will give you your own highly flexible, remotely accessible IT infrastructure.
To find out more about how we deliver the value of virtualisation to our clients, please do get in touch here