The Marriage of Virtualization and Business

Virtualization, a hot topic these days, rightfully so has caught the eye of many business leaders. VMware a proven leader in virtualization technology has been pushing innovation and changing the way IT decision makers view datacenters. But what makes virtualization so special and why would businesses even care?

Who is Churning the Butter?

Businesses have benefited for years from the traditional server model and infrastructure design ranging from towers to “pizza-box” rack mountable servers. Communication equipment and servers undoubtedly make up core and essential components of an organizations business. Without them business functions either cease to function, or will lolly-gag at a snails pace. Increased costs of power, real-estate and space constraints all contribute to the decrease in appeal of physical hardware. To add to the woes, the overall demand on datacenters and even small scale server rooms, are being pushed to their limits. The impositions stem from increased complexity of applications and services requiring multiple servers, possibly comprising of several layers of front end and back end load balanced designs.

Although virtualization marketing has been ramped up significantly in the last few years because of the discovery of the great benefits, it has a mature past. From the late mainframe design to early IBM research into virtual technology in the 1960s, virtualization has made large strides over recent years.

Driving Innovation and Expanding Business Markets

Put simply, if you are a business [...] and use technology, you will benefit from virtualization.

The competition between companies such as VMware, Microsoft and Citrix are only the beginning. As the competition becomes weightier and businesses begin to either use virtualization technology for the first time, or existing users transition more of their physical infrastructure to virtual, prices are guaranteed to drop while incentives increase. As a matter of fact they already are. VMware now offers their core hypervisor ESXi free, hoping to continue building their large user base. For more information on the new announcement and to download ESXi visit the ESXi product page. Microsoft offers a younger, less mature virtualization product, Hyper-V, however, has an advantage of an already large customer base, which will allow for some easy conversion to their virtualization technology.

One of the best results of all the development and competition is that virtualization technology is beginning to make sense for all business markets and industries. Small business to large business certainly benefit from utilizing technology that consolidates their infrastructure and allows for high availability and greater flexibility.

Put simply, if you are a business, organization, non-profit, educational system and use technology, you can and will benefit from virtualization.