Virtualization, now a days, is not a new concept; In fact, mainframe computers came into existence since late 1950s and can be considered an early phase of virtualization. Though virtualization has considerably advanced over last 50 to 60 years, the driving need for this technology remains almost same; IT professionals would always like to have controlled, secure and centralized management of their business computing environments.
Since its inceptions, server virtualization has been solving many problems in the data centers, such as providing high availability, automation & acceleration of disaster recovery, and consolidation. With new hardware available, disaster recovery restores the data to servers is more beneficial to most of IT infrastructures; thanks to the server virtualization.
In contrast, because some of the benefits of virtualization are intangible, sometimes it could be difficult for CIOs to justify the investment in a virtualization project. However, there are some tangible benefits of virtualization which could change their minds to go for it!
Maximize resource usage - Significant cost reduction
Usually to run a single application, one server needs to be added to IT infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure uses only about 15 - 25% of the required processing capacity & approx. 75 -85% of processing capacity is wasted not being tapped. But in virtualized environment, a single server can be used to run multiple requests of many applications running at a time. This increases utilization of almost 100% of processing capacity giving significant reduction of costs maximum ROI in less time.
Fast response time & high uptime
Customer demands keep on changing with rapidly changing technology; hence they expect quick responses. Thus, it is a need for organization to have efficient deployment environment. Traditionally, to set up a new IT infrastructure takes a longer time hence create hesitancy. Virtualized environment drastically reduces this cycle time because of the reduced number of physical devices and the centralized management providing high uptime for your IT processes.
Better disaster recovery - business continuity enabled
When it comes to disaster recovery, virtualization having virtual machines can replicate applications to any other available servers without loosing any important data. For instance, if any organization is having single mail server, it becomes critical to ensure constant uptime & it might require additional hardware for backup. Alternately virtual clones of the email server can be created with the available servers without buying additional hardware.
Increased security with single server for all your applications
There are several virtual machines sharing a single server for various applications in virtual environment. These systems run as isolated processes from each other giving each system its own sandbox environment.
Other benefits include reduction in one time and ongoing hardware acquisition costs is up to 40% and 75%. Also it reduces hardware related maintenance costs about 25 - 50% allowing efficiency benefits from increased manageability for the IT infrastructure. You may be asked about billions of dollars spent on buying number of physical hardware for different applications. But rather than asking what the cost of virtualization is, you should look into what would be the cost of not integrating virtualization.
