Virtualisation

Today’s businesses are under increasing pressure to:

• Improve system maintenance efficiency s to address business needs
• Find technologies to reduce capital, personnel, and operational costs
  

Server virtualisation gives a single computer the capacity to manage the workload of multiple machines and in doing so helps organisations address all of these challenges.

It’s a technology that’s fast changing the IT infrastructure landscape and we pride ourselves as being at the forefront of delivering this innovation.  Offering a reduction in server hardware costs of up to 50% and energy costs of up to 80%, this savvy software not only provides a cost effective solution, but also delivers environmental benefits too.

There are many arguments for adopting virtualisation software but for our customers key draws include:

• Server consolidation and infrastructure optimisation - Virtualisation makes it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilisation by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy ‘one-application-to-one-server’ model
• Physical infrastructure cost reduction - With virtualisation, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs
• Improved operational flexibility and responsiveness - Virtualisation offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance
• Increased application availability and improved business continuity - Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unexpected outages with the ability to securely back-up and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.

Introduction to Virtualisation (download)

 

Server Consolidation

 Through Virtualisation with VMware, ISG can help you eliminate server sprawl and platform dependency in order to allow your company to achieve its goals by using a virtual infrastructure solution. We can support your objectives by:

• Reducing your hardware costs by up to 50%
• Reducing the time in building and configuring new servers by up to 70%
• Reducing hardware expenditure by £000s every year

Furthermore, exploiting your business’s existing IT infrastructure by consolidating x86 servers with VMware Infrastructure 3 can create a virtual infrastructure delivering:

• Simplified management through a single administrative interface, using the production-proven VMware VirtualCenter management software
• Built-in capabilities for resource optimisation, application availability and operational automation, bringing dramatic cost savings as well as better operational efficiency, flexibility and IT service levels
• VMotion software that enables the live migration of virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity. Live migration of virtual machines also allows companies to perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime and disrupting business operations
• VMware DRS that works with VMware VMotion to balance computing capacity more efficiently across the resource pools in your virtual infrastructure. VMware DRS continuously monitors CPU and RAM utilisation, allocating available resources automatically based on pre-defined policies that reflect business needs and priorities.

Environmental and cost benefits

Energy consumption is a critical issue for all companies today, whether the goal is to reduce costs, keep your IT infrastructure running or reduce environmental impact.

• Fact: Most servers and desktops today are in use only 8-15% of the time they are powered, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power, even when idle.
• Fact: VMware virtualisation has advanced resource and memory management features that enable consolidation ratios of at least 15:1, increasing hardware utilisation by as much as 85%. VMware customers also reduce their energy costs and consumption by as much as 80% through virtualisation.

You can reduce the energy demands of your IT environment by right-sizing your IT infrastructure through consolidation and dynamic management of computer capacity across a pool of servers. VMware virtualisation delivers the resources your infrastructure needs and enables you to:

• Reduce server energy costs by 80-90%
• Power down servers without affecting applications or users
• Make your operations more environmentally friendly, while decreasing costs and improving service levels

Server Consolidation datasheet (download)

To contact ISG about our services please email: info@isg-technology.com