What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. Virtualization can make any business more efficient by decoupling important information technology functions from expensive, dedicated, dispersed hardware.
Benefits: Going Green Means Saving Green
Virtualizing your infrastructure saves power and reduces future electronic waste-reducing your company's carbon footprint while saving you time and money. More practically, virtualization greatly simplifies network management. It's the best way to increase network reliability and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) while improving disaster recovery and business continuity preparedness.
Types of Virtualization
Server Virtualization: For many server applications, virtualization allows organizations to take advantage of hardware components (such as 64-bit architectures and quad processors) that standard operating systems and applications do not support. Consolidation of server farms also saves rack space and reduces power costs, along with other benefits:
Server Virtualization consolidates the duties of many servers onto just one machine
- Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50%
- Reduce energy costs by 80%
- Reduce the time it takes to provision new servers by up to 70%
- Save more than $3,000 per year for every server workload virtualized
Application Virtualization: This most basic approach wraps mission-critical applications in a browser interface while they actually run on a server platform. End users see no change in performance or functionality, but centralized management and eliminating tedious individual upgrades and patches can reduce the total cost of application ownership by up to 50%!
Storage Virtualization: Virtual storage and Storage Area Network (SAN) technology provide for better business continuity and disaster recovery for minimal cost. What appear to end users to be dedicated servers and hard drives can be located anywhere on the network, even at a remote site, and easily copied or replaced when problems occur. This approach offers superb reliability and availability including storage on demand, dynamic storage allocation, online backup services, archiving and recovery, and offline snapshots.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Managing proliferating versions of operating systems, workstations, and applications is expensive and cumbersome. By virtualizing the entire desktop, you can realize additional savings by ignoring or standardizing workstation diversity, and adding centralized management of operating systems to that for applications. Implementing a VDI can lower your overall TCO of the desktop… workstation, operating system, and applications… by up to 40%.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure stores each workstation’s O/S on central servers
Why Virtualize with Promenet?
Promenet engineers are certified virtualization experts and we have close partnerships with the leading vendors who provide the latest technologies. We are ready to help your IT staff and business reap the benefits of virtualization in whichever way is currently appropriate for your needs.
Promenet engineers take a vendor-neutral approach that enables them to craft the correct virtualization solution for your business now and going forward. You can start small or begin with one mission-critical area, realize the benefits, and then expand your virtual infrastructure to gain additional savings. Regardless of which products or components you choose, Promenet will help you to:
- Reduce IT costs and improve flexibility and manageability with server consolidation
- Decrease planned and unplanned downtime for improved business continuity
- Eliminate planned downtime for maintenance with live migration of virtual machines
- Increase security and manageability by moving data from desktop devices into the datacenter
- Effectively and practically address environmental concerns such as energy efficiency
