What virtualization means for small & medium businesses

[dhilipkumar]

What virtualization means for small & medium businesses

Small business virtualization lets you lower the cost of your infrastructure while increasing the productivity of your staff.

As a small & medium business owner, you may have heard a lot about virtualization, but have not really understood how it can provide costs savings to your business and boost the productivity of your staff.

Dell have been leaders in providing virtualized infrastructure through its server range since 2006 and understands the needs of small and medium business to reduce the complexity of the IT operations and keep costs to a minimum.

So what is virtualization?

Simply put, virtualization enables one server or computer to act as many.

This means that instead of keeping your important programs on separate servers so that if one application or server fails, the other applications aren't affected, virtualization software lets you run many applications on the same server.

This means you may only require one server sitting on the floor, but it can act as though it were several servers. Virtualization software enables that server to be split up into different partitions.

Take a common SMB workplace example - one server could act as, say, three virtual servers with each virtual server running an application (i.e., file server, Web server and e-mail server).

Each virtual server acts completely independently from one another so that if one crashes, the others are not affected.

The net result is that you have to buy only one server and pay for its power consumption, the space to store it, it's cooling and maintenance.

You get the benefit of three servers for the cost of one.

Why look at virtualized servers for your SMB?

As a small business, time is money, and Dell can show you how to save both with virtualization.

Leading IT analysts Forrester Research report that 36 percent of the x86 server operating system instances at participating SMBs are virtualized, compared to 31 percent of operating systems instances at enterprises. Other SMBs are already reaping the benefits and are showing a faster adoption rate than their bigger competitors.

The fewer servers you need to run, the less power you are using, the less cooling is required, the less maintenance is need. Less time required equals less cost.

It provides SMBs with flexibility to scale up computing resources without the need to purchase new servers.

Virtualization is also an excellent tool for managing SMBs disaster recovery needs.

For many business owners, this is the key benefit to server virtualization. Often, especially in the small business environment, one of the major issues to restoring a production environment is the operating systems' dependence on specific hardware drivers.


This makes restoring that system complicated and time consuming.

In a virtualized environment, each logical server simply sees 'standard' hardware that any virtualization server can provide. So, in the event of a virtualization server hardware malfunction, the logical servers can be moved to a new virtualization server without any special restore process. The result: A massive reduction in downtime.

IT companies that understand SMBs and their challenges can help make them more profitable and IT systems less complicated and less costly. Effective IT adoption by SMBs can help them gain differential advantage during these times.


indiatimes
By Ravi Bharadwaj, Head of SMB SBU, Dell India