These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a business not concerned about softening its impact on the environment. Some businesses are adopting small, but significant environmentally-friendly practices, such as using less paper and switching to high-efficiency lighting systems.
Some businesses are also adopting a relatively new trend in the world of IT that has the potential to reduce a company’s energy usage by up to 90 percent – virtualization. Virtualization allows companies to tap into unused power in their computer networks by consolidating physical server hardware.
Traditionally, hardware and software products work together in a one-to-one ratio, a static relationship that leaves the full computing power of each element unrealized. Businesses locked into this inflexible relationship must purchase more hardware and software when their IT needs change or increase, even though they already own unrealized computing power.
By adopting virtualization, companies aren’t bound to a stringent relationship between hardware and software, they can actually run multiple operating systems on one machine and will realize multiple benefits of a dynamic IT environment.
Benefits
Energy/cost savings – With enormous appetites for energy, servers can devour power and make a significant contribution to a business’s carbon footprint. But when a company consolidates its servers through virtualization, it will often benefit from significant reductions in its use of electricity and also will save on hardware expenses.
Business continuity – Even if a business isn’t headquartered in a hurricane or earthquake zone, it is still susceptible to disaster. Whether a fire in the building or just a minor disruption in the IT network, unplanned incidents have the potential to slow business process and frustrate clients or customers. They may even lead to a loss of revenue.
Companies using virtualization, however, enjoy the benefit of compartmentalized workloads and business continuity even during disruptive events. Virtualization keeps the “domino effect” from occurring, which means one failed application won’t lead to the collapse of many other applications. It also maintains secure access to applications housed in remote networks.
Organizational agility – As mentioned earlier, traditional IT environments are not entirely efficient. Similar to standard vehicle transmissions, static environments require undue manual labor from IT workers whose time and skills are a valuable commodity in today’s workplaces.
Fortunately, virtualization allows IT workers to manage virtual machines, data centers and labs with a single, unified tool. As a result, these workers can respond to IT and business needs with greater agility and speed.
Next steps
Businesses can select from a wide range of economical and comprehensive virtualization toolsets that extend the power of virtualization across an entire IT infrastructure and provide businesses with an integrated solution that will profoundly and dynamically improve all operations.
When making plans to invest in virtualization technology, companies should review existing software licensing contracts to identify any virtualization-related rights they already may have purchased or any preferred pricing available for acquiring the software. Virtualization enables businesses to meld together their existing investments in computer hardware, software, and network infrastructure, and it allows for actual, not virtual, cost savings.
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