Server Virtualisation

Managing the increasingly complex infrastructure necessary to ensure application and data availability is a key IT priority. This management cost, escalating energy costs and the need for infrastructural flexibility have created a compelling business case for virtualisation.

How it works:

During typical capacity planning exercises, we have found that on average, a server running single applications uses less than 15% of its capacity. Virtualisation partitions each physical server into several independent 'virtual' servers, allowing customers to run multiple operating systems and applications securely on a single machine, or across a pool of servers, simultaneously reducing the hardware, maintenance and management costs.

Is virtualisation right for us?

In determining whether virtualisation will add value to your business, it is not only important to consider the benefits, but also carefully evaluate your network traffic levels; usage patterns, service availability requirements and scale. So how can virtualisation increase efficiency and availability of resources and applications in your organisation?

Sever Consolidation	You can run multiple 'virtual servers' simultaneously on one physical machine, the total number of physical machines you need is reduced. This reduces capital expenditure on servers and server networking infrastructure by a factor of four.
Lower Energy Bills	The cost of powering and cooling a server over its 3 year lifespan is estimated at over 10 times the original purchase price. With increasing energy prices, fewer physical servers mean lower energy bills and a reduced carbon footprint.
Simplified Server Management	In a traditional server environment, a server will have to be taken off line to conduct routine repairs and upgrades, resulting in costly out of hours work or expensive downtime. However, an application running on a virtual server can be moved from one physical machine to another in real time with no service interruption. This allows routine maintenance and hardware replacement during working hours. Application data can be held independently on a SAN (Storage Area Network), the virtual machine continues to connect with the SAN from its new location providing a seamless user experience.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity	Virtualisation delivers improved resilience and disaster recovery. If a single server fails, the same drag and drop functionality can be quickly deployed to minimise downtime, with faulty servers swapped out and replacement servers booting directly from the SAN. Most SANs now offer a range of DR features including I/O caching, ‘snap shotting', and volume cloning functionality, designed to reduce the possibility of data loss and provide the function to restore to a historic system state. In the event of a more serious incident, where backup tapes would have to be requested and delivered to your DR space, your DR servers can be immediately pointed at the secondary storage arrays mirroring data, giving you a complete and immediate data set.

Find out more

At Select Technology we work closely with you to understand your organisation's requirements, ensuring that we identify the solution that will maximise the return on your investment in virtualisation tools and technologies.

Through our extensive experience of virtualisation and SAN projects, we have become accredited partners for many of the best of breed virtualisation technology providers, including NetApp, Dell Equallogic, HP, Parallels, VMware and Microsoft.

Virtualisation IT solutions that deliver real business value