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5 Ways Virtual Servers Will Boost Your Small Business
By: SmallBizClub
Even if it seems a rather novel technology, we’ve been switching to virtual servers for at least a decade now. Despite the continuing popularity of this solution, business owners are still reluctant to fully embrace it, believing that physical servers offer optimal levels of both security and efficiency. What they should be aware of is that server virtualization brings many benefits that positively impact every organization. Here are 5 great advantages of switching your company to virtual servers.
1. Protecting the environment and reducing costs
Even if your organization doesn’t use environmentally friendly practices as a part of its brand identity, you can only gain on cutting back on power. Maintaining fewer physical servers will radically lower your operation costs—power and cooling won’t drain your resources.
By reducing your energy footprint you’ll also limit the general footprint of your data center. Virtualization involves much less physical equipment—it will occupy less data floor space, saving you resources to invest somewhere else in your operation.
2. A boost in efficiency
Switching to virtual servers, you’ll likely notice that they offer more features than physical ones—some of which are vital for your productivity and uptime. Functionalities like distributed resource, scheduling live migration, storage migration and high availability will instantly speed up your operation and ensure maximum efficiency.
Moreover, virtual servers allow you to move around your machines from one server to another—and that’s a sort of flexibility any business can use. Virtualization is still developing and in the near future we’ll see it grow to include long-distance migrations or offer an efficient solution for moving a virtual machine form one data center to another.
3. Easy move to the cloud
When thinking about the future, server virtualization seems a smart move. This year, many businesses will embrace the cloud and you can only imagine that virtualizing your servers first, you’ll be already prepared for this revolutionary move.
Related Article: Why Cloud Technology?
The move to the cloud will be easier for your organization because your whole company will already be prepared to manage their cloud operations and make the most from this innovative solution.
4. Improvement in disaster recovery
When it comes to disaster recovery, server virtualization can only help you. It essentially renders your organization independent from hardware vendors or server models—a virtualized disaster recovery won’t mean buying a set of identical hardware to create a similar production environment.
If your company relies on a smaller number of physical machines, you’ll be able to create affordable replications sites. To top it all, server virtualization platforms offer some powerful software to help you automate the failover in case of a disaster.
5. Time regained
If you decide to build a virtual server, this action will help you save a lot of time later when copying your materials—with physical servers, you’d have to change each machine one by one. Virtual servers have another time-saving advantage—they’re easy to maintain. You can build them, bring them down, upgrade their operating systems and easily manage your disk space across various servers.
The beauty of virtual servers is that you won’t need a new piece of physical equipment to set up a new one. All you need to do is access virtual software management console, click the right button and choose your operating system—and that’s it! In the past, setting up a server used to take at least 2 or 3 days; today you can benefit from new servers within a couple of hours.
Server virtualization is worth the trouble, but in some cases our data be best kept out of virtual platforms. See this insightful article to learn what sort of data should never be virtualized. (http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-shouldnt-virtualize/)
Author: Monique Rivers is an Australian tech blogger who also loves good food and fashion. She works at ninefold.com. Ninefold is a company providing efficient and powerful virtual servers for all those occasions when a business needs to move their ideas into the cloud. To contact Monique, please visit: https://twitter.com/ninefold
Published: April 2, 2015
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