Imagine hiring an employee that has a tremendous resume. She has a doctorate from an Ivy League school and over a decade of experience directly related to your business. IT managers from nearly every fortune five-hundred company have written her glowing letters of recommendation. She has proven time and time again the ability to thrive regardless of the workload placed upon her. And guess what? It’s a proven fact that her productivity will double every two years for at least the next two decades. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Now imagine that you mismanage her on a regular basis. Rather than finding ways to maximize this great resource, you hire someone exactly like her each time a new project begins. Pretty soon, you’re surrounded by incredibly efficient employees who are dreadfully underutilized. You’re paying top dollar to each of these employees who spend most of the day finding creative ways to waste time.
Sound familiar?
It should. It’s the IT systems acquisition model that has been practiced and accepted by business owners large and small for the past twenty years. Each time a new application is implemented, a brand new server is purchased. You have application servers running on the front end. Database servers running on the back end. Authorization and authentication servers are running in between. You are literally searching for space to install your new IT equipment. The perpetual increase in IT infrastructure also requires an increase in qualified personnel for IT management. Would it surprise you to know the average utilization rate for a server is typically less than ten percent?
And worse yet, utilization of servers are becoming even less efficient. Moore’s law states that computing power will double every eighteen to twenty-four months. We know this to be true because it’s been happening since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. At the same time, computing requirements for today’s applications have leveled off. So what does this mean?
It means there’s an opportunity to spend considerably less money on hardware. The reemergence of virtualization has given business owners the ability to harness the power of modern equipment and dramatically increase their return on investment.
Thirty years ago mainframe computing was at its peak. Rather than invest a thousand dollars on a personal computer for each user, dumb terminals were used to connect to sessions on mainframes. But physical restrictions such as disk space, processor power, and network performance pushed the resources away from a central computing infrastructure to the PC star topology commonly used today. One benefit that the mainframe has always had over the client/server model is utilization. Now, many of the deterrents associated with mainframe computing have been overcome by bigger and faster technology. This has helped create the mainframe and client/server hybrid system called virtualization.
Virtualization allows business owners to increase the utilization rates of their equipment to the maximum, while still leaving enough in reserve for the inevitable usage peaks. Rather than having a server for each task, virtualization gives virtual machines a pool of resources to draw from. Memory and processors are shared throughout the network to guarantee you’re getting the best bang for your buck. Below are a few of the many benefits of virtualizing your infrastructure:
- Decrease in equipment means a decrease in power consumption
- IT staff will be freed from the tedious task of equipment maintenance to pursue solutions to help make your business money
- You will get more out of your IT budget with the reduced cost of hardware
HLP Networks recognizes that virtualization is the next paradigm shift in computing. The shift has started in the data center servers and will continue to positively affect networking, desktop computing, and data storage. Take the first step toward the future and allow us to map your road to virtualization.