TMCnews Featured Article

It’s pretty well-known by now that server virtualization projects can reduce capital and operational costs, sometimes to an eyebrow-raising number. Other than this, of course, what are some other benefits associated with a server virtualization project?

According to Carousel Connect, the blog of Carousel Industries, Joe Pitkin, a Virtualization Architect with Carousel and veteran of many a virtualization project, stated through virtualization, “businesses are encapsulating the operating systems and applications normally residing on individual servers into software-based Virtual machines, many of which can reside on a single server.”

If that doesn’t immediately conjure up a virtual cornucopia of benefits, Pitkin spells out a few including: dramatically increased portability, efficiency, manageability, reliability and end user accessibility of an organization’s computing resources.

Sound good to you? Sure does to us. The blog post slows down and unpacks some of the major benefits in a little more detail.

“Virtualized environments provide high availability features, substantially reducing downtime.” What this means is that by establishing secondary hosts and monitoring the primary host, the system can withstand the primary server going down because it can migrate to the backup host in a matter of seconds. Goodbye service interruptions.

“As a general rule, businesses can expect up to a 10 to 1 reduction in servers with a well-implemented virtualization project.” This is because virtualization lets you get rid of huge tracts of lan... unused computing capacity, as well as lower the number of servers needed. The blog post mentions that the Westcon Group’s (News - Alert) CIO said they had gone from 325 servers down to 22, thanks to virtualization.

“By virtualizing servers, IT teams can centrally manage all VMs, as well as hosts and host clusters from a centralized interface.” This means it takes much less time to provision new servers, or to update, patch and upgrade servers from a centralized interface.

“Virtualized environments can result in lowered energy consumption.” Partly because, yes, you have fewer physical servers, but also because the software can monitor host resource usage based on pre-defined thresholds.

It was almost exactly one year ago that TMCnet reported that Carousel Industries announced the launch of its virtual internal systems to increase the IT responsiveness company-wide.

Along with this service, Azuri wrote, “Carousel Industries also offers its clients with various offerings across the IT spectrum like unified communications, IT security and mobility.”