5 Reasons You Should Replace Physical IT With Server Virtualization

IT hardware is advancing so rapidly today that it is difficult for any business to remain competitive. As technology budgets shrink, yet expectations on IT increase, having the right hardware infrastructure can deliver considerable benefits.

Here we discuss the 5 primary reasons why it is advantageous to migrate from aging, physical hardware, to a virtual platform as provided at Peer 1 Hosting.

Embracing the Cloud

To remain competitive as a business today, every IT function must embrace the cloud. The ability to take a physical hardware stack and migrate to virtual server architecture creates tremendous competitive edge in a cloud oriented business world.

It provides quicker access to real-time data, more resilient and flexible process management, minimized downtime and resource redundancy.

Cloud based infrastructure facilitates staff empowerment and lead nurturing of customers and partners. Running a virtual server environment elevates IaaS through private, public or hybrid cloud SaaS and PaaS as collaborative services.

This three pillar approach truly integrates business in the cloud, at a time when it is crucial to be faster and more agile than the rest. Virtual servers run in the cloud maximize potential to reach global audiences, align strategic partners and empower your staff.

Evolutionary Hardware: Virtualization

Enterprise technology is advancing so rapidly that many organisations are failing to keep up. These are predominantly companies that get locked into hardware contracts with multiple vendors or still run in-house IT infrastructures. This does not achieve operational efficiency in an age of cloud mobility.

Trying to manage IT demand for high performance, data warehousing, storage migration and resource scheduling, all with resolute fault tolerance and immaculate up-time, is a major headache for businesses running their own physical servers.

Virtualization on the other hand integrates an up-to-date hardware mix that meets the challenges of supply vs. demand, network traffic and streamlining of operational workflow.

Cost Maximization

Virtual server migration not only reduces residual costs but also maximizes technology budgets, based on remote IT enablement that is consolidated for efficiency at scale.

Not having internal hardware to manage and maintain creates huge cost savings in energy consumption, physical footprint and helps meet increasingly stringent government regulations on green IT efficiency.

Migrating to virtual servers, hosted and managed remotely, reduces spend with far reaching benefits. These include data center resourcing, administration and management cost reductions, processing power and cooling system energy savings, network architecture and additional IT costs incurred with a physical server infrastructure.

Testing and Provisioning

Using virtual servers consolidates hardware as a managed IT function that is robust and reliable. It also provides opportunities to run purpose built test and QA environments on spec.

Running pilot phase migrations and new applications across ‘dummy’ environments prior to go-live allows for proper needs analysis and process testing to be carried out without impacting daily workflow on live servers. Isolating performance bottlenecks and load balance reduces further the cost of migration and impact on live systems.

In this regard server virtualization provides the pivotal advantage of being able to pre-plan and provision system deployments with elastic capacity, near zero downtime and yet the tightest of security controls.

Virtualization: Absolute Security

Speaking of security, having the capacity to harness test and backup environments creates tremendous advantages not only to reduce the need for disaster recovery but also maintain integrity of service. Being able to revert back and build recovery procedures maintains server stability that is often the first failing of physical servers run in-house.

Creating affordable and externally managed, replication environments help automate fail-safe processes that maintain up-time and keep environments secure.

Running applications in isolation on virtual servers also helps reduce server redundancy, under-performance and security issues that come from physical server sprawl. A “just stick it on that server” approach that compromises data integrity and server load balancing.

Cheap and aging physical server hardware does not facilitate the growing information needs of your organisation in the virtual working world today. If you are stifled by a creaking internal hardware stack that you try to manage and maintain in-house, it may be time to look for a more reliable and scalable virtualization solution.

Neil Henry has over 18yrs experience in the IT industry, initially in application design and deployment, progressing to management of IT operations for leading enterprises such as Cap Gemini, Oracle, Barclays and the NHS. He specialises in cloud technologies that create business value from mobile, social and big data analytics, to support not just IT but all corporate functions. He wrote this post on behalf of Peer 1 Hosting.