Virtualisation and Consolidation
The 1980’s movement towards distributed computing shattered the chains of centralised control and put the power to change back in the hands of the business.
Unfortunately it spawned a new challenge—how to manage infrastructure sprawl.
It’s all well and good to empower business to change quickly and develop its own applications, but this can place a massive burden on the infrastructure that supports the change, resulting in greater complexity, increased risk and higher costs.
In our experience there are a lot of people in the same boat. Their Infrastructure has grown and developed in a piecemeal fashion. Every new application gets a dedicated server or multiple servers; every new tool or upgrade needs more space, power, cooling, storage, protection, bandwidth and sometimes a new client device too.
But it’s not all bad news. Thanks to great new (or reinvented) technologies such as server virtualisation it is possible to build an infrastructure that gives you the best of both worlds. The flexibility to respond to change quickly and the controlled, efficient use of resources that you need to run a tight ship.
Server virtualisation isn’t a nirvana though. Have you thought about the other parts of your infrastructure that grow with your server estate?
What about LAN and WAN or storage? You may still have local attached, network attached and SAN attached storage. And you probably have multiple applications that do the same thing supported by many databases on many different platforms.
We’ve learned that the best way to approach virtualisation is to firstly take a step back and think about the bigger picture—consolidation. Not just consolidating your servers, but also consolidating you applications, operating systems, storage and the other supporting infrastructures that make your business tick.
By looking at the bigger picture you can save more, reduce complexity and move at your own pace towards a utility computing mode.
One of our UK defence customers looked at the bigger picture and didn’t just consolidate their servers. They also reduced their applications dramatically, consolidated their networks, and improved their storage and protection capabilities. Click here for more information.
Another good example of consolidation is provided by one of our telecommunication customers. They wanted to reduce the downtime of a mission critical system and provide a less complex and easier to manage environment.
We’ve been helping our customers consolidate and virtualise their infrastructures for years and have world class experts with real life experience that can make the process just that little bit easier for you.
Click here for more information on how we can make a difference.
