about Galtec Solutions Ltd
In a Virtual World...
29 Mar 2010
In today's IT savvy market place business capability has become closely linked to IT capability. As IT infrastructure has become increasingly complex, it can often be described as inflexible, brittle, and costly. In fact, the typical company spends upwards of 70 to 80 percent of their IT budget to simply maintain the status quo.
According to Andrew McMorris of Galtec this can leave a business starved of innovation: "Some organizations have reached a point where business opportunity is literally trapped within its IT infrastructure."
"Most small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses in trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services."
SMEs often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a do more with less mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow, added Andrew.
One of the most effective routes forward for the SME lies in virtualisation technology which simplifies IT and allows a company to effectively utilise storage, networking and computing resources to control costs and respond more quickly to the myriad of challenges within the market place. Andrew went on: The virtual approach to IT management creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, enabling administrators to allocate these resources quickly to the highest priority applications and the business needs that require them the most.
With virtualization, hardware management is completely separated from software management, and hardware equipment can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking resources to be reallocated as and when required to various software services.
In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them whilst administrators gain the ability to efficiently manage and optimize resources to serve the needs of the business, he added. The adoption of virtualization among SMEs is widely predicted to grow exponentially within the next few years and it presents a compelling argument for incorporating this technology you?re your IT philosophy. There are a number of key benefits as Andrew explained: It allows you to slash capital costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend.
VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy enabling small and medium sized businesses to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent.
It also positively impacts on staff productivity and improves business responsiveness. VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. They provide IT professionals with the freedom to be released from menial tasks.
VMware virtualization can result in faster provisioning of new applications in minutes, not weeks, and can accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes, added Andrew. The issue of affordable business continuity is another key factor with VMware solutions offering complete data protection, truly continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites. Andrew continued: These capabilities were previously too costly and complex for SMEs to even consider. It helps them protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance, eliminating the need for maintenance windows.
It also strengthens security as virtualization enables automated patch management of server hosts and virtual machines and an integrated firewall that maintains security policies across the mobile, flexible environment and decreases operational costs.
VMware's "Always on IT" High Availability provides rapid and automated restart of virtual machines without the cost or complexity of solutions used with physical infrastructure. VMware ESXi is the next-generation, no-cost OS-independent hypervisor that makes virtualization easy to deploy. It enables companies to partition a physical server into multiple virtual machines to quickly start experiencing the benefits of virtualization.
Requiring minimal configuration, users can be up and running in minutes with a production-ready hypervisor that scales to run the most resource intensive applications.
VMware Server is a free, hosted virtualization product that supports the broadest range of Windows and Linux operating systems. Now in its second generation version, with over three million copies distributed, VMware Server is extremely easy to use since it installs like an application over a host OS, and is ideal for test and development environments.
So there's a clear case for exploring the virtualisation options available with few UK companies more experienced in this respect than Galtec. Give Andrew a call today to find out more or register for one of our free, upcoming "lunch and learn" seminars. Can you afford not to?
Galtec are offering free capacity planning for all Galtec Browser readers for a limited period contact Andrew McMorris by email at a.mcmorris@galtec.com or call him on 0113 228 2208.