Can you afford to ignore the benefits of Virtualisation?

There is a way to be green, slash your IT costs, yet still service all your requirements with a fraction of the hardware you may be currently employing. It may sound too good to be true, but virtualisation is the hot topic in the IT world, and when you assess the potential benefits offered by leading managed web host Netcetera, it’s easy to see why.

Netcetera is at the cutting edge of the Virtualisation revolution and has announced the latest addition to its impressive armoury, in the form of the VM500 Server, powered by Microsoft Hyper–V. In effect this new technology provides a scalable, reliable and ever-present virtualisation platform. It comes with a single set of integrated tools to manage both physical and virtual resources.

Virtualisation has been acclaimed as the perfect solution for companies of all sizes. It enables then to maximise their IT efficiency while operating fewer physical machines – with the resultant knock-on effect of significantly reduced costs in terms of hardware, energy and management overheads.

Netcetera’s server virtualisation enables multiple operating systems including Windows and Linux to run on a single machine as ‘virtual machines’. A single data centre consolidates workloads across a number of underutilised server machines. In simple terms the result is maximum performance, security and controllability, and a more dynamic IT infrastructure with fewer physical machines. It’s therefore leaner, greener and incredibly reliable.

Tim Cass, Netcetera’s CTO believes the virtualisation revolution is now unstoppable: ‘We’re experiencing a valuable emerging class of technology,’ he said. ‘Virtualisation builds on the principle of a dynamic data centre able to maximise the benefits of a combination of physical and virtual servers. At just £25 per month the VM500 Server offers tremendous value – with all the benefits of a traditional dedicated server – yet instantly scalable, removing the need for huge upfront capital expenditure as your company grows.’

Other areas in which server virtualisation can add real value include:

• Test environments and disaster recovery; complete flexibility and drastically reduced lead-time whilst minimising the cost of otherwise static and under-utilised test-servers.
• Scalability: The addition of new server images or physical capacity to the shared processing frame is achieved dynamically, while maintaining interruption-free operations.
• Resilience: Consolidated environments are normally configured to include disaster recovery or business continuity by default. The result is improved resilience and service levels when compared with stand alone solutions.