When we talk about taking the plunge into virtualization, the most pressing question is always “Yes, but how is it going to affect my bottom line?” The evidence is there. Among the myriad virtualization benefits, it is most obviously and importantly going to have a significant impact on your bottom line. In fact, VMWare’s virtualization platform can cut capital and operating costs by “as much as 60%”.
Virtualization benefits that effect your bottom line.
1. Slashing the number of servers needed
For starters, moving IT from a more nuts and bolts approach of infrastructure management to a delivery of cloud-based services lowers overhead and makes your IT operations less labor-intensive. An IT operation no longer requires a team of engineers and programmers maintaining a stack of servers. VMWare virtualization can consolidate your servers by ratios up to 30:1, cutting down on the space needed to house your hardware and the manpower and resources needed to maintain it.
2. Dramatically reduced downtime
What happens when your physical IT systems go down? You go into red alert and mobilize an entire team to get your operation back on its feet as the dollars and cents fly out the window. Virtualization will change your operation management scheme from reactive problem solving to a proactive, dynamic, diagnostics-driven scheme that reduces costs through improved efficiency. If a physical server partitioned into virtual machines does go down, it’s easier to move a virtual machine to another server and distribute the downed server’s work to other servers.
3. Cut down on energy costs
A no brainer – the fewer physical servers you need to power, the cheaper your energy and cooling costs are going to be. For IT operations, “going green” is not just a trendy business model – it’s a means for a business to streamline its infrastructure and reserve important capital for other aspects of operation such as marketing or research and development. As far as virtualization benefits go, this is one of the most obvious, and still one of the best selling points.
4. Increased application efficiency
Running applications from the cloud helps cut down on application compatibility issues, and allows older applications to run more seamlessly. All this comes together to cut down on server waste, allowing applications to run faster and more smoothly and increasing productivity for your business. When adopting new applications, virtualization allows software developers to quickly and easily set up testing environments.
Here are a few other quick statistics virtualization adopters have reported:
- The number of new projects is up by 21 percent
- Application time to market has dropped by 22 percent
- Rework and testing time improved by 26 percent
- Server incidents are down by 27 percent
- System downtime have been reduced by 26 percent
Whether your company would benefit from an incremental transition into virtualization, or you’re looking to move your start-up into the cloud and lay down a foundation for cloud-scale operations, you’ll find an attractive return on investment and simplification of your IT operations with the right virtualization platform.