Benefits of a Well-Planned Virtualization with Cloud Computing for Businesses
One of the biggest challenges the IT departments are facing today is to keep up their work environment. This is due to the need to maintain the IT infrastructure to be able to meet the current demand for services and applications, and also to ensure that in the critical situations of the company, they are able to resume normal activities quickly. And here is where the big problem appears.
Many of the IT departments are working on their physical limit, logic, and economics. Their budget is very small and grows an average of 1% a year while managing the complexity grows at an exponential rate. It has been viewed as a real cost center and not as an investment, as I have observed in most companies.
With this reality, IT professionals have to juggle to maintain a functional structure. For colleagues working in a similar reality, recommend special attention to the Virtualization topic.
Instead of speculating, Virtualization is not an expensive process compared to its benefits. Believing that depending on the scenario, Virtualization can be more expensive than many traditional designs.
To give you an idea, today over 70% of the IT budget is spent just to keep the system environment functioning, while less than 30% of the budget is invested in innovation advantage, differentiation, and competitiveness.
This means that almost any IT investment is dedicated simply to “putting out the fire” to solve emergency problems and very little is spent on solving the problem.
I followed a very common reality in the daily lives of large companies, where the IT department is so overwhelming that you cannot measure the time to think again. In several of them, we have seen two completely different scenarios. A before and after Virtualization / Cloud.
In the first case, what we have seen is a bottleneck with reality, drastic, and resources to the limit. In the second scenario, a scene of tranquility guaranteed safe management and scalability.
Therefore, consider the proposal of Virtualization and discover what you can do for your department and therefore, for your company.
Within this reasoning, we have two maxims. The first: “Rethinking IT” and the second is “Reinventing The Business“.
Rethinking IT
The big challenge for organizations is precisely this: Rethink. What to do to transform technical consultants?
Increase efficiency and security
To the extent that the structure increases, so does the complexity of managing the environment. It is common to see a data center dedicated to a single application. This is because the best practice for each service request has a dedicated server. Obviously, the metric is still valid, because, without a doubt, this is the best option to avoid conflicts between applications, performance, etc…
Also, environments such as this are becoming increasingly detrimental as the processing capacity and memory are increasingly underutilized. On average, only 15% of the processing power is consumed by a server application, that is, over 80% of processing power and memory is actually no use.
Can you imagine the situation? We, first, have virtually unused servers, while others need more resources and ever lighter applications, the use of hardware has been more powerful.
Another point that requires careful consideration is the safety of the environment. Imagine a database server with a disk problem. What will be the difficulty of your company today? The time that your business needs to quote, purchase, receive, change, and configure the environment to drop the item. During all this time, what was the problem?
Many companies are based in cities/regions far from major centers and therefore may not think about this hypothesis.
With Virtualization it does not, because we left the traditional scenario where we have a lot of servers, each hosting its own operating system and applications, and we go for a more modern and efficient.
By working with this technology and we have underutilized servers for different applications/services that are assigned to the same physical hardware, sharing CPU resources, memory, disk, and network. This makes the average usage of this equipment can reach 85%. Moreover, fewer physical servers mean less spending on supplies, memories, and processors, which means less purchasing power and cooling, and therefore fewer people to manage the structure.
At this point you should ask, but what about security? If now I have multiple servers running simultaneously on a single physical server, am I at the mercy of this server? What if the equipment fails?
New thinking is not only the technology but how to implement this technology in the best possible way. Today, VMware, the global leader in Virtualization and Cloud Computing, works with a technology cluster, enabling and ensuring high availability of their servers.
Basically, if you have two or more servers that work together in the event of failure of any equipment, VMware identifies this fault and automatically restores all its services on another host. This is automatic, without IT staff intervention.
At runtime, the physical failure is simulated to test the high availability and security of the environment in the future, the response time is fairly quick. On average, each server can be restarted within 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or up to 2 minutes between each server. In some scenarios, it is possible that the operating environment will restart in about 5 minutes.
New services quickly become ready
In a virtualized environment, the availability of new services becomes a quick and easy task, since resources are managed by a Virtualization tool and not tied to a single physical machine. This way you can hire virtual server resources only and therefore avoids waste.
On the other hand, if demand is rapidly increasing daily, it can increase the amount of memory allocated to this server. This same reasoning applies to the records and processing.
Remember that you are limited by the amount of hardware present in the cluster; you can only increase the memory to a virtual server if this report is available in its physical environment. This ends underutilized servers, as it begins to manage the environment intelligently and dynamically, ensuring greater stability.
Integrating resources through the cloud
Cloud computing is a reality; however, there is “No Cloud Without Virtualization”. Hosting providers now offer cloud tools through which you can create your own private cloud using the virtual structure all managed through a single tool.
Reinventing The Business
After rethinking, now is the time to change, now is the time to reap the rewards of having an optimized IT organization, we have seen that when we do a structured project the high availability, growth capacity, & computer technology everything becomes much easier, in the terms of benefits we can mention the following:
Respond quickly to expand the business
When working in a virtualized environment, you have to think in a professional manner to meet all your requirements, you can meet the demand for new services, this is possible with VMware Cloud Hosting because it offers a new server configured in a few clicks, in five minutes and offers a new server ready to use. Today, it has become crucial, since the start time for new projects are decreasing.
Increase focus on strategic activities
With a controlled environment, management becomes simple and it is easier to focus on the business. That’s because you get almost all the information and operational work is to have a thought of IT in business, and that is to transform a technical consultant. Therefore, a team will be fully focused on technology and strategic decisions, and not any other teams like firefighters, as they are dedicated to putting out the fires caused.
Aligning the IT department’s decision making
Virtualization allows IT staff to have the metric of reporting and analysis. Having these reports in their hands, with a professional tool they can lead to a fairly simple language and understand the reality of their environment. Often, this information supports a negotiation with management and, therefore, the approval of the budget for the purchase of new equipment.
Well, friends, that’s all. You might find it lengthy, but it’s really hard to explain something important in fewer lines. Hope, the article will help you in planning your business well with Virtualization and Cloud Computing to reap maximum benefits.