Virtualisation and Consolidation

Why Virtualisation?

The focus for many organisations has been on virtualisation as a driver for consolidation.

Virtualisation is a way of creating an environment in which applications share key resources such as CPU, memory and disk.
If you have explored this area, you will no doubt recognise that the undoubted leader in the field of virtualisation software is VMware.
We ourselves have successfully assisted a number of dynamic organisations research, install and operate a virtualised environment using VMware software.
However, this is not an inexpensive exercise and, with rising software licensing prices and the weakening of the pound against the dollar, the return on investment for such an undertaking needs careful consideration and planning.

Planning Stages

Such planning might start with a relatively low cost capacity planning exercise. This involves a site visit, a data collection exercise over a 4 - 6 week period, followed by the presentation and discussion of a comprehensive report.
The report will help identify your potential reduction in the total number of servers, which applications could be hosted in a shared environment and any exceptions.
It can then be used to create budgetary quotations for recommended server specifications dependant on your needs for load balancing, resilience and any business continuity.
To find out more about this stage of your virtualisation planning, call or email us today for more details.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Virtualisation may be a driver behind business continuity and disaster recovery planning. There is a strong case for implementing virtualisation in such a scenario. Virtualisation can be a very affordable way of delivering a level of resilience to your IT resources that was previously only available to very large organisations with significant cash reserves and levels of IT investment beyond the reach of many mid-sized or smaller, fast growing companies.

To find out how affordable this is, contact us today.

Virtual Desktop and Thin Client Projects

There is a growing tide of discussion within many organisations about the desire to move away from a PC (fat client) environment to a Terminal (thin client) environment.
This is a secondary benefit of implementing a virtualised environment and is discussed in more detail on the thin client section of our website.
If you want to know more about this area of opportunity and the potential benefits to your business, please call or email today.

Consolidation

We believe there is a subtle difference between virtualisation and consolidation. To us, consolidation is about making the best use of the IT resources available today and making the right decision to preserve, and therefore consolidate, precious resources.

We have listed a few examples of our thinking on consolidation below:

• Why buy computing resources from vendor A, when vendor B offers an identical solution in half the rack space, with less than twice the power need or twice the heat output?
• Why buy a typical windows file server when you can deliver your file, print and windows (or UNIX) directories direct from an iSCSI storage device (iSCSI SAN)?
• Why buy a new generation of server with quad core computing when a dual core server is more cost effective, uses less power, gives off less heat and is cheaper to buy and maintain?

We aim to offer you a choice. Yes, we buy and sell technology, but we are also very, very conscious of budgets. We are conscious of our responsibility to long term sustainable business with our clients and the impact of our efforts to promote, wherever possible, a more environmentally friendly approach to the demands of business users.