Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Virtualization for Small & Medium Businesses

Enabling Always On IT for SMBs

Small businesses face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. Small businesses often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a "do more with less" mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.

VMware vSphere for small business is the most cost effective way to enable Always On IT - the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations optimized for small and midsized businesses


Always On IT

Virtualization technology simplifies IT so that companies can more effectively utilize their storage, network, and computing resources to control costs and respond faster. The virtual infrastructure approach to IT management creates virtual services out of the physical IT infrastructure, enabling administrators to allocate these resources quickly to the highest priority applications and the business needs that require them the most.

With virtualization, hardware management is completely separated from software management, and hardware equipment can be treated as a single pool of processing, storage, and networking power to be reallocated on the fly to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them - while administrators gain the ability to efficiently manage and optimize resources to serve the needs of the business.

VMware equips SMBs with technology solutions that allow them to cost effectively optimize the use of their existing IT assets and resources as well as protect the systems, data, and applications that run the business, ensuring Always On IT. With analysts predicting the adoption of virtualization among SMBs to double in the next 24 months, these benefits are making this compelling technology a mainstream mandate for SMBs.


Benefits

Slash capital costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy - enabling SMBs to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent.

Enhance staff productivity. VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. They provide IT professionals with the freedom to be released from menial tasks, enabling them to take a more strategic role in the enterprise.

Improve business continuity. VMware solutions offer complete data protection, truly continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites. VMware virtualization helps SMBs protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance, eliminating the need for maintenance windows.

Improve business responsiveness through improved efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness. Managing a virtual infrastructure allows IT professionals to quickly connect and manage resources to meet ever-changing business needs. VMware virtualization can result in faster provisioning of new applications in minutes, not weeks, and can accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes.

Improve application quality and deployment. With VMware virtualization, SMBs can test more applications by optimizing pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.

Strengthen security. VMware virtualization enables automated patch management of server hosts and virtual machines and an integrated firewall that maintains security policies across the mobile, flexible environment and decreases operational costs of managing them.

1 comment:

  1. Bob, We are currently running ESX 3.5 and will be upgrading to vsphere 4.0 in the near future so I found this article timely. We will be running the Enterprise version of vsphere in our main data centers because we have a SAN already in place. We are currently looking at virtualization solutions for some of our smaller field offices. Since I work for Stratus Technologies we have implemented our own Avance solution which has worked very well for us. We have also looked at HyperV and now vsphere for SMB looks like something to look at as well. We will not have any type of shared storage solution at these field offices so I would be interested in seeing how you think these 3 solutions would compare. Thanks.

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