CAN APPLICATION VIRTUALISATION REALLY SAVE ME MONEY?
Many organisations are utilising advanced enterprise-wide applications with such underlying technology as SOA, Web 2.0 and Exchange 2007. Whereas these applications are more responsive to the needs of the business and enables new application features to be added and for systems to interact, they are demanding a more agile platform than traditional x86 server-based computing.
When was the last time you were asked to upgrade an application or add a new module only to discover that it would require a server upgrade or additional server hardware to make it work? The issue we are facing now is the hardware is more often than not, holding back our ability to use the latest and greatest software.
We strongly believe that Application Virtualisation is one way of solving this problem and putting in place a more dynamic infrastructure to provide the flexibility you need, and at the same time, usually save you money.
If you are not looking into Application Virtualisation already, then we believe this is something you should consider for three main reasons:
Hardware Cost & Footprint
The constant demand for each new application to have its own dedicated server is not only costly, but is also making many
computer rooms run out of physical space to house all of these servers.
Through virtualisation, you effectively pool and share your hardware resources. You create the same dedicated server environment in what is known as a virtual machine, however, multiple virtual machines can sit across multiple servers. In essence, you are utilising less servers and pooling their resources to deliver what you would normally require more servers to deliver.
Whereas there is cost associated with the virtualisation software required to make this possible, the cost savings resulting from the reduction in hardware required produces a positive payback in a matter of months.
Accelerated Application Lifecycle
I am sure you are well familiar with the processes and procedures that you have to put in place to support your business-critical
applications and the implementation of new releases and extended functionality. This often requires multiple environments and
stages that an upgrade/enhancement has to go through, such as set-up environment, test environment and production environment,
to name but a few.
This is not only costly in terms of all the different hardware that is required, but also makes the upgrade process lengthy. (often longer than the release cycle from the software vendor).
A virtualised environment enables you to have each of these virtual environments reside on the same physical environment. The migration through the cycle is then greatly accelerated and the risk of introducing issues when moving from set-up to test or worse, test to production, is greatly reduced. Again, significant cost savings in IT time can be made in addition to the value delivered to the business with reduced life-cyle timescales.
Application Quality of Service
Today’s applications require dynamic scalability and most businesses also need ‘always’ availability. With virtualisation,
dynamic scalability is provided for each application and across multiple applications and with the pooling of resources,
any required increase in capacity is greatly reduced.
By having applications virtualised over multiple physical devices the dependency on single server availability is removed. Servers can be taken down for routine maintenance or repair while the application continues to function across the remaining virtual devices.
To find out more about what the Application Virtualisation can do for your business, or how b2Lateral can help you plan your Virtualised infrastructure