Saving Costs with Virtualization

VIRTUALIZATION this is buzz word which is with many companies accross the IT industry. At the present scenario considering the economic downturn, many companies are looking forward to implement virtualization. Understanding the importance of virtualization even redhat and microsoft are implementing interoperability in virtualizations. But one questions to mind for many of them is what is virtualization . how is it evolved and what are the advantages????

Say for example we want to create a file server; of course we will need to have lots of storage space, but accessing this data will not put much strain on the processor or processor cores on this machine. To better utilize the resources on this machine, we decide to add other services onto this computer. Even though we are now using the computer resources more efficiently, we are also opening up the computer to a wider range of possible attacks. This is where virtualization comes in. We can utilize the resources of the computer much more efficiently and still keep our systems optimized and secure for the type of role that they play in our overall IT environment.

i will explain an example how the concept of virtualizastion is useful practically. If you currently have 24 servers in your datacenter; with virtualization you can reduce that number to 3. With fewer servers to purchase and maintain the savings can add up pretty quickly. Also because you are using fewer servers to do the same amount of work as before, you will also see a savings on electricity and cooling in your data centers.

Virtualization allows us to periodically take snapshots of our computers so that in case of an unforeseen shutdown, we can restore the snapshot and have our machines up and running much faster than having to go through a normal system restore from backup.

The economic downturn has prompted more businesses to deploy green IT practices, some of which are reaching energy savings of up to 80 per cent, a claim suggests.


These are the fews things which i got from http://www.bladewatch.com here it explains the advantages of virtualization
Reducing hardware support costs - particularly if you consolidate from different server types to fewer - the less range in your hardware support cost, and the younger your servers, typically the lower the cost. For example 16 types of Compaq Proliant to two types of HP/IBM blade?

Energy efficiency - you should be able to consolidate many physical servers to one physical server, fewer servers providing the infrastructure, coupled with ideally things like SAN boot, energy efficient processors and power supplies.
Business empowerment - possibly the most important one, being able to deploy and roll back more on demand in line with the business need - that we can provision/reconfigure servers more quickly, a memory upgrade need not be a three week process.
Disaster recovery opportunities - could your disaster recovery data center be consolidated to require less data center power and space? Do I need all those rack servers, or a batch of blades?