Virtualization - Need for Business Modernization

In order to establish smart spending, many IT/Tech decision makers are implementing technology solutions designed to increase operational efficiencies while reducing costs.

Virtualization in Day 2 Operations is one such kind of solution, the process in which virtual versions of infrastructure and hardware, operating systems, computer networks and more are used in data centers instead of physical equipment. Virtualization enables businesses to realize substantial operational efficiencies that simply aren’t possible when using the only physical equipment. It caters a variety of benefits to companies, including the following five:

•  Minimum energy consumption: Virtualization enables companies to consolidate their physical servers by migrating them to virtual versions. Instead of physical servers, generally speaking, never run at maximum capacity, virtual machines can be fully optimized, allowing companies to only use the resources they need. People who have been inside a data center knows how loud and cool such environments can be. Virtualization avoids companies from having to spend lots of money on the costs associated with energy and keeping equipment that cool—especially attractive in an era of rising utility bills.

•  Minimized expenditures: In addition to the cost savings as explained, businesses that choose to virtualize their data centers are able to operate in the same capacity with far less equipment, like network gear, servers, and numbers of racks needed. Lesser equipment means businesses can get by with less physical space in the data center. Which means more room is cleared up at offices that have data centers on-premises, and for those businesses that collocate, less room is required to be rented. 

• Faster server provisioning: Fast-paced business world, the needs of a company can change on a dime. Earlier, when new servers were required, businesses had to fill out orders and subsequently wait for equipment to be shipped before provisioning it. With proper virtualization, new servers can be provisioned in a matter of minutes, granting companies the ability to deploy resources in an elastic fashion when demand dictates. 

• Improved uptime: Recent research says 73% of businesses have experienced unplanned outages over the last five years—unexpected downtime can be crippling for any business. Factually, downtime can cost small- to medium-sized businesses an average of $12,500 per hour. Factoring in organizations of all sizes, that number balloons to $212,100 per hour. Few features of virtualization include fault tolerance, high availability, and storage migration, which allow virtual machines to quickly recover from downtime or avoid getting knocked offline altogether. In Addition, virtual machines can be shifted from one physical server to another in minutes, liberating businesses from worrying about enduring extended unplanned downtime. Importantly, as 87% of businesses that can’t access their data for more than a week close their doors within a year. 

• Supreme disaster recovery: Along with the cost of downtime fresh in your mind, it is important to realize that when disaster does occur, virtualization allows companies to get back online faster. Companies that virtualize free themselves from hardware lock-in, meaning less-expensive hardware can be installed at the disaster recovery site as it’s rarely used. In Addition, because less space is required to store equipment, companies are able to create a smaller backup location than in the case of a business relying solely on physical machines. Last but not the least, most virtualization solutions are equipped with failover software that is automatically triggered in the event systems go down. Most of them are testable solutions that allow owners to see beforehand if their disaster recovery solutions are indeed working rather than having to hope for the best should they face such a situation.

Benefits of the virtualization don’t end there. Businesses that leverage the technology are also putting themselves in the best position to prepare for a migration to the cloud as they become increasingly familiar with running networks that no one is able to physically touch in the office. As more companies realize the power the day 2 operations for cloud providers and migrate computing resources there, moving forward with virtualization becomes that much more sensible.