How to get more value from your existing computer hardware

 As the needs of your business evolve, meeting customer demands, potential growth opportunities, and reducing operating costs all play critical roles. Planning and investing in your IT infrastructure early on will make this transition easier as your company grows.

Virtualization allows you to run more than one operating system at a time on a single physical server, letting you add computing resources as needed without the cost of buying, deploying, and maintaining new hardware. It is also an excellent option for simplifying backup, failover and disaster recovery solutions.  A “virtual image” (the complete operating system, applications, permissions, and data) can be moved from one host machine to another, providing an upgrade path and disaster recovery solution in the event of a hardware failure.

System virtualization is nothing short of remarkable from an IT and cost saving perspective. Most clients do not realize that they are able to reduce their server count when they buy new hardware using virtualization. Netropole is in the process of consolidating our servers using virtualization – our goal is to bring our server count down from 35 to 20 to decrease our energy use and operating costs.

Servers are not the only things that can be virtualized. Desktop systems, storage devices, and even networks are fair game. Furthermore, one physical server, running one application, can be transformed to look like multiple servers when virtualization technology is applied. The key message is the focus on cost savings. In terms of managing the server, it opens up new opportunities for new applications and processes.

We are also testing “desktop virtualization.” If it works as well as we think it will, our team members will only need a screen, keyboard, and mouse in their work area, which will then connect to their “virtual workstation.” Then, for instance, upgrading to Windows 7 will be as easy as dropping a “virtual machine image” on to the network and assigning it to the user. On their next login, the user will have a fully functioning Windows 7 machine without the usual hardware upgrade costs and downtime. When you hire a new employee, for example, instead of having to provision a new computer for them, you will be able to create a virtual desktop machine instead.

Virtualization makes it very affordable to create a high availability and disaster recovery plan for your IT infrastructure based on virtual machine environments. Because virtual machines can be easily replicated, backed up, and moved from one machine to another, virtualization simplifies the recovery of your data in the event of a system failure.

In a virtualized environment, operational costs savings are substantial. These savings stem from reduction in power, management costs, and the costs associated with server downtime. Netropole can help you put virtualization solutions in place to achieve savings, simplification, and scalability within your business.

If you would like to know more about how to virtualization or other current technologies that can save you money, give us a call at 503-241-3499 and we will be happy to share what we know. ∆