Storage Consolidation & Virtualization

Benefits:

• Increases existing server and storage utilization and efficiency.
• Helps devise a centrally managed server storage plan.
• Centralizes and Efficiently Managed backup and recovery operations.
• Helps devise a simple disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
• Virtualization is used to consolidate the workloads of several under-utilized servers to fewer machines, perhaps a single machine (server consolidation), bringing your savings on hardware, environmental costs, management, and administration of the server infrastructure.
• Your legacy applications might simply not run on newer hardware and/or operating systems. Even if it does, if may under-utilize the server, so as above, it makes sense to consolidate several applications. Virtualization helps you here, as such applications are usually not written to co-exist within a single execution environment.
• Virtualization can provide the illusion of hardware, or hardware configuration that you do not have (such as SCSI devices, multiple processors etc). This can also be used to simulate networks of independent computers.
• Virtualization allows for powerful debugging and performance monitoring. You can put such tools in the virtual machine monitor, for example. Operating systems can be debugged without losing productivity, or setting up more complicated debugging scenarios.
• Virtualization make software easier to migrate, thus aiding application and system mobility.