Cost and Space Savings

Saving on the costs of IT infrastructure is a reality when you switch to virtualization.  The cost savings also extends to reduced energy consumption and IT personnel while reducing the amount of space that is required to house an IT environment.

Hardware is most often the highest cost in the data center. Reduce the amount of hardware used and you reduce your cost. But the cost goes well beyond that of hardware — lack of downtime, easier maintenance, less electricity used. Over time, this all adds up to a significant cost savings.

Speedy Disaster Recovery Time

In the event of a system failure or disaster virtualization allows for faster recovery of IT resources which provides for improved business continuity and revenue. The older infrastructures are incapable of recovering within a few hours and in most cases, companies experience a much longer downtime which results in revenue loss.

Disaster recovery is quite a bit easier when your data center is virtualized. With up-to-date snapshots of your virtual machines, you can quickly get back up and running. And should disaster strike the data center itself, you can always move those virtual machines elsewhere (so long as you can re-create the network addressing scheme and such). Having that level of flexibility means your disaster recovery plan will be easier to enact and will have a much higher success rate.

Better Scalability

Virtualized environments are designed to be scalable which allows for more flexibility when it comes to company growth.  Instead of purchasing additional infrastructure components, new applications and upgrades can easily be implemented with virtualization.

Better Return on Investment

In addition to reducing the costs of maintaining an older infrastructure, companies can increase their ROI by ensuring business continuity following a disaster and preventing revenue loss.

Less Heat Buildup

Millions of dollars have gone into the research and design of heat dissipation and control in the data center. But the cold, hard fact is, all of those servers generate heat. The only way around that? Use fewer servers. How do you manage that? Virtualization. Virtualize your servers and you’re using less physical hardware. Use less physical hardware and you generate less heat. Generate less heat in your data center and a host of issues go away.

Faster Redeploy

When you use a physical server and it dies, the redeploy time depends on a number of factors: Do you have a backup server ready? Do you have an image of your server? Is the data on your backup server current? With virtualization, the redeploy can occur within minutes. Virtual machine snapshots can be enabled with just a few clicks. And with virtual backup tools like Veeam, redeploying images will be so fast your end users will hardly notice there was an issue.

Easier Backups

Not only can you do full backups of your virtual server, you can do backups and snapshots of your virtual machines. These virtual machines can be moved from one server to another and redeployed easier and faster. Snapshots can be taken throughout the day, ensuring much more up-to-date data. And because firing up a snapshot is even faster than booting a typical server, downtime is dramatically cut.

It is much easier to recover a virtual machine than a physical device. Virtual machines are easier to deploy because they can be moved from one server to the next. In addition, new virtual environments can be cloned in seconds in order to adapt to fluctuating business needs. Snapshots can be distributed to multiple points to ensure up-to-date data. Since firing up a snapshot is quicker than booting a conventional server, downtime is significantly slashed. Furthermore, service providers can run mirror virtual machines at a remote site, which serve as backups in the event that a corporate virtual machine fails.

Better Testing

What better testing environment is there than a virtual one? If you make a tragic mistake, all is not lost. Just revert to a previous snapshot and you can move forward as if the mistake didn’t even happen. You can also isolate these testing environments from end users while still keeping them online. When you’ve perfected your work, deploy it as live.

No Vendor Lock-in

One of the nice things about virtualization is the abstraction between software and hardware. This means you don’t have to be tied down to one particular vendor — the virtual machines don’t really care what hardware they run on, so you’re not tied down to a single vendor, type of server (within reason of course), or even platform.

Single-Minded Servers

With virtualization, you can easily have a cost-effective route to separating your email server, your web server, your database server, etc. By doing this, you will enjoy a much more robust and reliable data center.

Easier Migration to Cloud

With a move to virtual machines, you are that much closer to enjoying a full-blown cloud environment. You may even reach the point where you can deploy VMs to and from your data center to create a powerful cloud-based infrastructure. But beyond the actual virtual machines, that virtualized technology gets you closer to a cloud-based mindset, making the migration all the more easy.

Greener Pastures

Let’s face it: If you’re not doing your part to help clean up the environment, you’re endangering the future. Reducing your carbon footprint not only helps to clean up the air we breathe, it also helps to clean up your company image. Consumers want to see companies reducing their output of pollution and taking responsibility. Virtualizing your data center will go a long way toward improving your relationship with the planet and with the consumer.

Smoother IT Operations

Virtual servers enable staff to do more with less, especially IT departments. Server virtualization allows administrators to be more efficient and agile, providing a simpler way for technicians to set up and update a network. Prior to virtualization, it would take weeks for technicians to install and maintain a chain of network-connected devices on physical hardware. With virtualization, network functions can be installed on virtual machines in weeks instead of months.

Isolation of Applications

In the land of physical servers, data centers usually abide by a one app per server model to isolate applications. While this was a sufficient way to reduce the number of physical servers, it gave rise to application incompatibilities. With server virtualization, applications on dedicated operations systems can be placed on a virtual server, thereby nipping incompatibility programs in the bud. This also reduces server waste by optimizing physical server resources, and correctly provisions virtual machines with a precise amount of memory and disk access.

Superior Businesses Continuity

Business continuity refers to a company’s ability to continue to deliver a quality product or service in wake of an unexpected disturbance. Business continuity management (BCM) is understood as a holistic management process that pinpoints and safeguards against potential company threats. Before virtualization, the procurement of physical hardware thwarted employees from meeting recovery time following an incident. Virtualization provided staff with the software, files and communication tools needed to access a single body of data for better business continuity.