Technology is complicated and expensive—and becomes more so with every passing year. That unfortunate reality can be intimidating to a lot of companies; they don’t fully utilize the tools at their disposal, or pay for redundant services, or are simply too hesitant to upgrade their existing solution. This costs them a lot of time, money, and peace of mind. We want to change that. Welcome to part three of Attentus’ ongoing cost reduction series, where we’re highlighting ways to save money on your IT solution. This time we’re going to be discussing virtualization: what it is, and how it can benefit you.
If your company is currently working with several servers and an expensive-to-maintain infrastructure, then virtualization might be the right path for you. Saving money, increasing efficiency and flexibility, and better supporting cloud services are all good things—this is one decision that can bring all of those things to your doorstep.
So what is virtualization? Virtualization is the IT equivalent of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and so on: it outsources the resource requirements of your system. Virtualization is about hosting your servers, desktops, and accounts on one centralized platform by using tools like VMWare, Hyper-V, or Virtual Desktop. Modern hardware is fast, modern processors are powerful, and memory is extremely inexpensive, so why not take advantage of that? Servers are extremely expensive, up to $50,000 each. With modern technology, one $15,000 server can host up to 10 or 20 of those server environments on one hardware platform, depending on the individual server requirements. This lets you fully leverage modern CPU speeds and inexpensive RAM, memory, and storage, cutting down the number of servers you’re relying on dramatically. This has the additional benefit of removing the additional power costs, temperature monitoring costs, and other general maintenance expenses that can add up over time.
Virtualization is flexible in implementation; you can fully virtualize, or you can go with a hybrid solution. A Hybrid cloud virtualization solution would involve running your virtual instances on a local server, but mirroring those instances to the cloud. This allows you to easy swap over to the cloud version in an emergency (without having to pay for constant cloud uptime) and significantly reduce or eliminate downtime. Most of the standing costs for cloud services are based on bandwidth, CPU cycles, and memory—not actual storage. This means that storing the mirrored-over data in this kind of hybrid environment is incredibly cheap. A virtualized environment allows you to easily access and manipulate data, while saving a significant amount of money.
If you want to discover other ways to save money on your IT solution, then you can view our previous entries on our blog. If you’re interested in virtualizing your own network, or if you have other standing IT concerns or projects, feel free to give us a call. We’d love to get you started on a new path!
