If you’re like most small-medium sized business owners, you own and independently operate a business with less than 100 employees, have revenues of less than $500,000 annually, and are not market dominant. You may be wondering if the new, ‘greener’ technologies can work for your company. Can your business enjoy the same benefits as your larger counter-parts by investing in ‘green’ technologies such as virtualization? The global economic downturn means that it is more important than ever to ensure that every penny counts and that your business is run efficiently and cost effectively. This post will (hopefully) help you to identify whether your company can benefit from implementing virtualization technology while reducing your environmental impact.
Benefits of Virtualization Technology
Virtualization is a green technology that is rapidly growing in both acceptance and importance. It is essentially software that sits under the operating system (“OS”) and allows physical servers or desktop systems to become ‘virtual’ equipment. Instead of having a bank of servers for different purposes, under-utilized in terms of storage while consuming large amounts of energy, you can have a single physical server running a variety of virtual servers under the virtualization model. A few benefits of this model include:
- If one of the virtual servers suffers from a malfunction, the data can be transferred quickly and relatively easily to a new virtual server thus minimizing disruption to your business and decreasing any downtime or inconvenience to clients and customers.
- New software can be rolled out across a network quickly and simply via a remote connection.
- Power consumption and cooling requirements are also reduced with the reduction in equipment.
- Space requirements decrease once virtualization is implemented due to the decreasing amount of physical hardware needed.
- Network maintenance time and costs are decreased leading to increased efficiency.
- You need only to build a server once but can deploy it many times across the network or system.
- Allows for hassle free software evaluation without the need for installation or configuration which can lead to delays and problems.
- New applications, test patches, or operating systems can be easily tested.