Of all the hardware you utilize in your business, your servers are likely to generate the highest costs – especially when you consider how much they cost to procure, power, and maintain. A considerable part of running a successful business is to know how to use these kinds of resources optimally, getting the most bang for your buck, as the saying goes.
Let’s discuss how you can push your servers that much more via virtualization.
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is the reliance on virtual resources, rather than physical ones, to accomplish the same tasks.
Look at it this way: any computing device has x-amount of the following resources to contribute: processing power, storage space, memory, and networking ability. However, depending on the particular task that a device is engaged in, a good portion of these resources could easily go to waste. This is especially true with a server.
Let’s say you had a server, hosting one of your line-of-business applications. If you wanted to incorporate another application into your workflow, a vendor may recommend that you purchase an additional server to host it. Of course, there are situations in which this approach may be necessary, but in many situations, it is very likely that your original server has the capacity to host both applications, and that the first application leaves plenty of resources to spare. By deploying a virtual machine, you can effectively turn the one server into two – each with its own instance of the operating system, and each hosting one of the applications needed, but still only using a single physical server to host both.
Why Utilize Virtualization?
There are a few reasons that businesses will adopt virtualization, the first of which perhaps being the most obvious: cost savings. Using one server for multiple purposes is going to incur fewer costs than multiple servers, each for a specific purpose, ever could. Not only is that an effective means of saving some money as far as procurement goes, your team will have less maintenance to perform – allowing you to make better use of your budgeted funds and time your team is available – as well as reducing your power output and its associated bill.
An additional benefit of virtualization is how helpful it is to your business continuity preparations. If you were to suddenly experience a hardware failure, it is a relatively simple matter to replicate your virtualized environment to a functioning infrastructure and pick back up from where you were interrupted. This is also why virtualization also aids in data migration purposes.
To try virtualization out for yourself, reach out to the team at Macatawa Technologies. Call 616-394-4940 today!
