Virtualization

Virtualization is a catalyst for creating an enterprise-wide dynamic infrastructure, enabling integrated management of IT resources, improved resiliency, flexibility and faster service delivery. SDTEK, however, has a broader perspective, in which virtualization is seen as a general approach to decouple logical resources from physical elements, so that those resources can be allocated faster, more cost effectively, more dynamically, wherever the business requires them in real-time to ideally meet changing demand levels or business requirements.

Virtualization is not just for large enterprises. It is a well-established technology that reduces hardware requirements, increases utilization of hardware resources, streamlines management and reduces energy consumption.

What is virtualization?

Virtualization is technology that allows application workloads to be managed independent of host hardware. Multiple applications can share a single physical server. Workloads can be moved from one host to another without downtime. IT infra-structure can be managed as a pool of resources, rather than a collection of physical devices.

Economics of Virtualization for the Small – Medium Sized Business:

With organizations of all sizes watching costs more closely than ever, what are the economics in support of virtualization? The initial (that is, entry) hardware cost is not the most expensive part of the investment. The majority of the expense is the long-term cost of operating and powering that hardware. Small and mid-sized businesses that have implemented a virtualization strategy can realize a return on their investment (ROI) and, in some cases, in less than one year.

Additional benefits include a new warranty, lower total cost of ownership and a server that takes up less space, uses less energy, and makes less noise. 97% of small and mid-sized businesses surveyed felt their VMware project met or beat expectations (based on poll by IBM conducted in 2011).

Benefits of Virtualization:

Today, multi-core processors from Intel® and large memory capacities allow dual-processor servers running VMware virtualization software to host application workloads that, just a few years ago, would have required four-socket servers or larger. This intelligent sharing of computing, storage and information resources by different disciplines and departments in an organization unlocks the value of multi-core processors.

In a virtualized environment, system resources are gathered into a virtualized resource pool—and can be allocated dynamically—allowing servers and storage resources to be used more efficiently. From the IT side, costs will fall; this commonly occurs because of reduced complexity, enhanced resource utilization, recaptured floor space in space-limited data centers and improved energy efficiency. Service levels will climb; the performance and scalability of existing services will be boosted and new services can be developed and rolled out much more quickly. Risks, too, will be mitigated, because the up-time and availability of key, mission-critical and revenue-generating systems, applications and services will generally climb with virtualization.

From the business side, virtualization can help to create a foundation for growth. When new strategies are suggested by changing market conditions, those strategies will be easier to create and deploy via a virtualized, dynamic infrastructure.

Risk management

Virtualization can allow small and mid-sized businesses to implement a cost-effective disaster recovery plan. Not only does virtualization ease the process of planning for continuity and recovery, it also enables effective testing of those plans—with no downtime to the applications.

In short, VMware virtualization strategy can help mid-sized businesses by providing the capability to virtualize more—using fewer systems; consolidating servers with exceptional system reliability features and providing end-to-end management—from platform through services—to align IT with business goals. With more workloads on each physical server, companies need the most reliable and resilient systems for their virtualized infrastructure.

Improve IT Services

Virtualization can help you improve IT services:

● Rapidly provision new application workloads—cut setup time from days or weeks to minutes.
● Improve IT responsiveness to business needs.
● Eliminate planned downtime by moving workloads before hardware is serviced.
● Greatly reduce—even eliminate—unplanned downtime.

Summary

Virtualization is the key element of the IT strategy for businesses of all sizes, with a variety of benefits for small and mid-sized businesses. It helps them to build an IT infrastructure with enterprise-class capabilities and it does so with a form factor—and an ROI—that fits any business.