The Benefits of Virtualisation for SME’s
The Bunker has compiled this piece to highlight some of the many benefits Virtualisation offers SME’s.
Slash capital costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualisation delivers improved utilisation of servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and procure – enabling SME’s to increase utilisation rates for x86 servers from approximately 10% up to 70%.
Improve application quality and deployment. With VMware virtualisation, SME’s can test more applications by optimising pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.
Improved Business Continuity. VMware solutions offer complete data protection, truly continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites. Virtualisation can help SME’s protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance, eliminating the need for maintenance windows and increasing end customer satisfaction.
Backup and Disaster Recover. Again, when set-up correctly a virtualised environment can make backing up and restoring a Dedicated Server very easy indeed. Take a simple process where you create a snapshot or copy of the Virtual Computer at regular intervals, these snap shots are stored in disk or tape and allow you to restore your server to a previous state with very little fuss. While, the same thing can be done in a single server environment, how often do you get a chance to test a restore (if you only have one server, its near on impossible to test until you really need it to work).
Energy Savings. Using virtualisation reduces energy consumption by allowing businesses to run their applications on fewer physical servers, which in turn reduces power and cooling requirements. Consolidating 30 physical servers into 30 Dedicated Hosting accounts running on one server would save over 100,000 kWh per year. That’s as much energy as is consumed on average by 10 houses, and can save up to 84% on the energy bill. While it remains to be seen whether SMEs will embrace green IT to the same degree as their larger corporate counterparts, if service providers effectively and concisely articulate the fiscal benefits of their green IT elements then the Bunker believes they are well positioned to capture the green IT SME opportunity.
For more information please email one of Bunker Advisors at sales@thebunker.net
