As discussed in Part 1, many companies have yet to explore virtualization technology and garner its benefits. Part 2 will discuss three more ways virtualization can benefit your business: Disaster Recovery Improvements, Productivity Multiplied, and Savings from Energy Efficiency.

Many believe that the most important benefit from server virtualization is being able to transfer a virtual machine from one server to another server safely and rapidly. Performing backups of data can be fast and efficient because making a replication site is quite easy.

The majority of enterprise virtualization solutions provide software that assists the automation of the failover during disasters. It will also allow the testing of a disaster recovery failover. It can be thought of as fire escape planning for a data center.

In the event of a disaster, the data center infrastructure will be configured and prepared to take the steps necessary for a rapid and safe recovery. This would be quite difficult to accomplish with arrays of physical servers.

Less physical servers on premises will result in decreased maintenance and management, saving time and money. In addition, applications that once required days or weeks to provision will now take only minutes. Both of the above will allow IT personnel to work on more productive and profitable assignments that will support new endeavors and generate revenue.

Migrating physical servers to virtual machines lets organizations group them into less hardware. The immediate benefit is the significant reduction of expenses for cooling and power. The savings will not only help a business on its bottom line, but it can also be proud of being more “green.” A study by a virtualization platform concluded that server consolidation will result in energy savings of up to 80%.

Choosing an expert computer technology-support provider is an important decision for your business. Alpha Engineering Associates has been a trusted partner of many companies in the Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis areas since 1990 and offer:

• 24/7 Managed Services for Business Computing Systems

• Network and Mobile Computing Support

• Disaster Recovery Planning

• Software Development

For affordable client-focused network consulting services and solutions, please call Alpha Engineering Associates today at (410) 295-9500.