Four Steps To Gaining The Benefits From Virtualisation

Improving business efficiency is high on every organisation’s agenda given today’s economic pressures. As we have talked about on numerous occasions, virtualisation technology gives you a fast track way to reduce costs and improve the performance of your systems.

We have found that everyone is under extra pressure to save money this year. And because IT typically makes up a good chunk of the budget in most companies, it can seem like the logical place to make cuts. But the most obvious belt-tightening tactics, simply putting off capital expenditure, can be counterproductive. By foregoing key technology advances in favour of short-term cost savings, companies can rob themselves of much larger long-term technology savings, as well as make it difficult to achieve their goals. That is why the smart organisations are looking beyond this year’s bottom line and carefully selecting products and services that can get their companies ready for better times.

Business efficiency means simplifying administration and maintenance tasks, making operations more intuitive, and ensuring that advice and support are easily available. Virtualisation can help in all of these goals. It is a proven way to free up space in the data centre, reduce power consumption, increase uptime, and dramatically reduce your hardware replacement budget; virtualisation is the secret to saving money while at the same time improving the performance of your IT solutions.

Here are b2Lateral’s four steps to Virtualisation:

Step One: Get virtualised fast
The goal of virtualisation is to reclaim time, money, and man-hours. That’s why it is important to plan ahead - to make the transition to a virtualised infrastructure as fast and smooth as possible.

Deploying virtualisation on the servers and storage in your data centre doesn’t have to mean hiring more IT staff. Instead, you can use b2Lateral initially to help get you started. b2Lateral can also reduce the learning curve for your IT team on the new, more sophisticated virtualisation features in releases like VMware vSphere 4. We have done it before, have extensive expertise and can pass on our knowledge to your people. We will help tune your solution such as vSphere 4 to improve performance by up to 40%.

Step Two: Business Efficiency
IT belt-tightening is geared toward saving money, but you can achieve the same goal by boosting business efficiency. Virtualisation is the secret to this strategy, which can also go a long way toward minimising your administration time and your virtualisation investment.

Step Three: Change the Economics of Storage
Virtualisation has the potential to transform the traditional cost equation for storage in your business. Because it optimises the use of storage media and makes storage administration a great deal simpler than in the past, storage virtualisation should be a key part of any business efficiency drive. Today’s storage solutions in your remote offices can extend the domain and expertise of your central data centre and lets you rest easier knowing that remote offices are compliant with backup requirements and gives your IT team new freedom to move and back up virtual machines without a lot of time-consuming complexity.

Step Four: Get More for Your Investment
By helping to accelerate ROI on virtualisation and consolidation projects, improve service level agreements, and ensure compliance with internal and external policies, Virtualisation products and services from b2Lateral can make achieving greater business efficiency.

If you are still left wondering as to the impact that virtualisation can have on your business, you need to talk to us; we are the experts in virtualisation from all of the leading vendors. For more information, call Derrick Hall on 0844 664 2565 or email Derrick at dhall@b2lateral.net