Virtualization: A necessity in modern hosting

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Virtualization: A necessity in modern hosting

Mainframe computers launched in the late 1950s are considered as the pioneers of Virtualization. Although virtualization has considerably advanced over the last 60 years, the driving need for this technology was always relevant from then. Its importance lies in the fact that, IT professionals always prefer controlled, secured and centralized management of computing environments in their business.

Ever since its inception, server virtualization has come up with answers for many problems in the data centre, such as providing high availability, automation & acceleration of disaster recovery and consolidation of the same. Disaster recovery restores data to servers, which complements IT infrastructure; thanks to the server virtualization.

In contrast, some of the benefits of virtualization are intangible. Hence at times, CIOs would find it difficult to justify the investments in a virtualization project. However, there are some extensible benefits of virtualization, which could easily influence them.

Maximize resource usage – Significant cost reduction

Usually to run a single application, one server should be added to the IT infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure uses only about 15% – 25% of the required processing capacity & approximately 75% -85% of processing capacity is wasted by not being tapped. But in a virtualized environment, a single server can be used to run multiple requests from different applications. This utilizes almost 100% of processing capacity thereby giving significant reduction in cost and maximising ROI in comparatively lesser time.

Fast response time & high uptime

Customer demands keep on changing with rapidly changing technology; As a result, they expect quick responses. Hence, there is a need for organizations to have efficient deployment environment. Traditional deployment of IT infrastructure takes a longer time but virtualized environment drastically reduces this cycle time, thanks to centralized management that provides high uptime for the IT processes.

Better disaster recovery – business continuity enabled

When it comes to disaster recovery, virtualization can replicate applications to other available servers without losing key 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

In a virtual environment, there are several virtual machines sharing a single server for various applications. These systems run as isolated processes from each other giving each system its own sandbox environment.

Other benefits include –

  1. Reduction in hardware acquisition costs (40% – 75%).
  2. Reduction in hardware related maintenance costs (25% – 50%)
  3. Better manageability of IT infrastructure

In short, instead of thinking too much on the cost of virtualization, it is important to ponder more on the cost of not integrating virtualization.

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