Bluntly said, the eventual goal of every business is to be profitable – to compound the profits, curtail the losses and bring in cost efficiencies. However, with the ever rising competition and plummeting profits, businesses are urgently seeking every avenue to even stay afloat.
Over the last few years, Virtualization technology has gained increasing popularity amongst businesses as corporations opt to consolidate their infrastructure to get a return on investment from their hardware expenditure, sometimes as high as $3000 a year! By leveraging virtualization, businesses reduce IT costs associated with complex computing environments such as power and cooling along with the support costs while improving their efficiency, storage, and becoming more agile.
Businesses that invest in Virtualization realize ROI in the following ways:
Less is more. Always.
As per the IDC, a virtualized environment would see a cost saving of at least 50% in hardware, its maintenance and staffing. The consolidation of multiple applications cuts all the hardware costs of a dedicated server. It requires less facility space than dedicated servers and decreases the costs to power. (Power accounts for over 50% of the costs of running a data center.)
As per a McKinsey report, the total costs of electricity for running data centers around the world was $ 11.5 Billion in 2013, and this doubles every five years per data center. Additionally, Virtualization also reduces ongoing system administration and maintenance time spent by IT staff by about 20 percent thereby impacting the holistic business expenditure.
Resource utilization
Virtualization can tap into the underutilized resources of your organization. Today’s enterprise servers dedicated to a single application may use 10 to 20 percent of its capacity; while a Virtualization layer can increase utilization to 70 to 80 percent. For example, instead of 100 servers running at 30 percent of capacity, you can have 40 servers running at 70 to 80 percent utilization.
Lesser Downtime and Quicker Disaster Recovery
A key benefit of Virtualization is its ability to back critical data quickly and rather effectively. At a time of a natural disaster, power outage or a malware attack virtualization successfully minimizes organization downtime, responds quicker to downtime than otherwise and helps protect against business disruption. This is because a simpler server environment increases performance and second, businesses with a backup virtual server can replicate business data instantaneously.
Fast Server Provisioning
Businesses with a virtualized environment are able to provision for new applications or hardware, and streamline routine business processes much quicker than in a traditional set up. This strengthens the organization and makes it responsive to environmental changes.
A survey of India’s top CIO’s concluded that for 64% of the respondents reducing costs is one of the key IT priorities. And as derived above, Virtualization solution can go a long way in helping CIOs and IT Administrators achieve this. However, you can land up reducing the savings if not executed correctly. Understanding the complexities of the infrastructure, knowing the layers of virtualization offerings in respect to pricing and licenses and implementing the solution correctly are critical stages to arrive at the right solution for your business.
Embee has worked with several clients implementing virtualization solutions and in driving cost savings of over 60% from server consolidation and VDI deployments
