Increased efficiency and productivity
A virtualized environment can help an organization in regards to efficiency and productivity. This is accomplished by virtualizing the server infrastructure and consolidating workloads to allow for better utilization of storage, power, management, and IT resources. In turn this increases the reliability of applications and reduces cost.
In order to truly understand the efficiency and productivity gains of a virtualized environment, it is important to first know what virtualization is and how it works. Virtualization is simply the consolidation of multiple IT resources into one. The resources may be servers, storage, software applications and networks. This process has been around since the late 1960s when IBM introduced a technology called time-sharing (a form of virtualization) on their mainframe computers. Virtualization became mainstream in 2009 with the introduction of the Xen and KVM open source software platforms.
Easier disaster recovery
When a server fails, hardware, software and operating system updates are typically required to correct the problem. In a virtual environment these issues can be corrected easily by simply powering down the server and reinstalling the necessary components from scratch. This allows for full control over the server’s configuration and reduces downtime when problems arise.
These methods combine hardware, software and operating system updates into a single process that can be easily controlled and managed. Combined with full control over the server’s configuration, this simplifies the disaster recovery process and reduces downtime caused by failures.
Providing easy access to disaster recovery tools, support for business continuity tools (BCT) and virtualization technologies gives IT departments a clear path to take advantage of these time-saving benefits. These technologies make updating servers easier so that downtime is minimized when a system fails.
