Enterprises irrespective of their size face complex IT challenges. Contrary to the popular belief that virtualization is only for large scale enterprises having sizeable data centers, the fact is even Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) have a lot to gain from it.
Virtualization needs less physical hardware which allows SMEs to save on the cost of servers and their maintenance. This in turn reduces the time spent by their IT staff on the maintenance of servers. Also, virtualization offers simpler backup and disaster recovery solutions for SMEs.
In a virtualized environment, the deployment of new services is faster which makes research and development an easier task. Usually, enterprises have limited IT staff and virtualization experts who spend most of their time in training existing staff to manage several dedicated servers and learn new management tools. Server virtualization services offered by professional virtualization experts helps promote efficient management and faster server provisioning in SMEs. The adoption of server virtualization by SMEs has considerably increased nowadays in order to:
- Flexible, uninterrupted access to desktops
- Improved security and compliance
- Reduced IT management costs
Virtualization Best Practices
In order to achieve maximum benefit from moving to a virtualized environment, SMEs should always follow the virtualization best practices which include:
- Identifying business goals that can be best met with the help of virtualization technology.
- An infrastructure audit to determine the extent of virtualization – be it for consolidation of servers and applications, improving disaster recovery, reducing costs or accommodating future expansion.
- Setting the right needs and expectations and calculating the ROI on deploying the technology.
- First moving smaller applications to the virtualized environment and once familiar, then moving mission-critical applications.
- Use of existing hardware for virtualized environment.
- Comparing costs and considering solutions based on future business needs while evaluating new equipment.
- Repurposing the underutilized servers to further reduce costs.
Virtualization can help SMEs considerably eliminate downtime and improve availability. App virtualization solutions offered by experts can enable enterprises to move to a fully virtualized environment as the capacity increases allowing them to save on cooling, power, cabling, storage, and space costs.
Unified Systems
It is essential for SMEs to align their data center operations with their network operations in order to achieve maximum gain from virtualization. Allowing the consolidation and standardization of storage, server, and network resources results in enhanced resilience, greater utilization, application availability and extended lifecycle of capital assets.
A unified system delivers end-to-end optimization for virtualized environment and key features like high-availability allow enterprises to scale up and down as per the needs of their business. Apart from this, a unified system also helps in:
- Reducing TCO
- Improving business agility
- Increasing IT staff productivity
- All resources can participate in a unified manner
While moving to a virtualized environment offers innumerable benefits, it is extremely important that enterprises opt for virtualization management services only from globally recognized and certified virtualization experts having vast experience in ensuring round the clock availability of infrastructure and on-demand delivery of IT services.
