3 Ways to Upgrade Your Technology Platform Without Increasing Costs
As of 2017, virtualization is still among the top ten IT priorities for small and medium businesses. During the first wave of wide-scale VM adoption, smaller companies found challenges with virtualization technology—licenses were expensive, and management was difficult. If you looked at virtualizing your data center a few years ago, it may have made sense for you to wait—but not anymore.
Virtualization technologies have now matured to the point where they make more sense for the average SMB. The benefits to the business are more fully realized, and easier to achieve. As a result, budget for virtualization were forecast to grow during 2016—and 65% of companies said they were piloting new virtualization solutions. Let’s look at a few reasons why it makes sense for small and midsize businesses to take another look at virtualization.
1. Virtualization reduces energy costs
Previously, only large businesses could truly reap the cost benefits of virtualization, essentially via economies of scale. By contrast, there are now virtualization solutions from our partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that are purpose-built for smaller businesses, such as the HPE Hyper Converged 250 systems, powered by Intel® Xeon® processers. These lighter-weight products let companies achieve the cost-benefits of virtualization without tradeoffs in terms of stability.
Just on the face of it, it’s easy to see how virtualization can keep costs down. Every physical server that you virtualize and run on a host equates to less physical space therefore, lower electricity, cooling, and maintenance costs. Not every company will see the same reduction in TCO from virtualization. The key factor to consider is that overall costs decrease as you increase utilization per VM.
2. New management tools prevent server sprawl
Part of the early problems with virtualization is that, for some, it became too easy to create virtual machines. The tools to flag inactive and unused VMs didn’t exist, however—which led to a great deal of idle VMs clogging up hosts. Without attention to detail, these redundant virtual machines would cause resource expenditures that would mitigate any cost savings produced by virtualization itself.
Newer management solutions are built to track and monitor host performance, notifying administrators when large numbers of unused VMs threaten to slow down infrastructure. This allows companies to fully realize the benefits of virtualization.
3. Prepare for Containerization
Containerization is what comes after virtualization. Among other benefits, this new software technology allows administrators to take any application and place it into a container that represents the operating system it runs best on. For small businesses, this technology provides a distinct benefit—administrators can quickly move containers between virtual machines, desktops, and clouds without seeing any change in how their applications perform.
The infrastructure that’s optimized for containers, however, is largely the same infrastructure that’s optimized for virtual machines. In fact, many companies see a distinct benefit in running containers on top of VMs, as opposed to bare metal. So, in order for SMBs to adopt a containerization strategy, they’ll most likely need to lay the groundwork for VMs as well.
Get a Just Right virtualization solution from Comport
If you’re making a case for virtualized infrastructure at an SMB, you need to come armed with all the facts. Comport works with our customers to identify the right solutions for them. Our expertise in the data center and our partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise allows us to offer Just Right IT solutions that are perfectly designed to bring virtualization into the SMB market—and your business could reap the benefits. Contact our virtualization experts at Comport today to learn how we can design a low cost solution that will save you money while scaling to fit your needs.
