Archive for the ‘virtualization’ Category

Can the Cloud Help You Drive Down Business Costs?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

There are two ways to increase your company’s revenue and boost the bottom line. You can excel at winning new clients and make additional sales to increase revenues. Or you can cut costs. Ideally, most businesses will look for a combination of the two. Cloud computing can help to accomplish this.

Cloud computing allows you to take advantage of hardware and software as a service. Rather than buying the equipment and making space for a server room – and, of course, hiring an IT staff dedicated to maintaining that equipment – your company can backup data offsite without sacrificing its availability. With a secure infrastructure, password-protected access, and optimized resources in a managed cloud solution, you can be sure that the data you need is available when you need it.

Similarly, with software as a service, cloud computing makes it easy for your staff to access email, documents, data, and reports on the go – all via a secure, web-based login. Whether traveling for a client meeting, working with a team in another location, or telecommuting, the cloud can ensure that your staff are working as effectively as if they were in the office.

Additionally, this sort of mobile access allows company executives and staff to handle everything from inventory tracking to project management to customer relationship management from the office and on the road. Security can be managed easily, and maintaining the equipment doesn’t require additional space or additional staff.

In other words, when you take your business to the cloud – whether for hardware or software as a service (or a combination of the two) – you will find that you are able to increase the access that your staff have to information that they need – allowing them to excel and drive sales. You’ll also discover that your staffing and equipment needs decrease. As a result, you will find that you are able to:

* Maximize the return on your IT investments
* Increase utilization of your current IT technology
* Enhance the lifespan of existing server equipment
* Integrate data storage and access from a variety of platforms

Increasing your company’s capabilities will allow you to keep pace with your competitors. Decreasing costs will allow you to budget effectively; turning to the cloud allows you to devote resources to product development rather than to maintaining your company’s IT.

By turning to the cloud with the help of a solution provider like IBM, you will be able to ensure that your resources are as efficient as possible, reduce the risks of turning to the cloud by relying on a secure infrastructure, and – ultimately – reduce the costs associated with IT at your organization.

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Is Your IT Architecture Prepared for Growth?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Growth is something that most businesses strive for. In order to accomplish it, however, you’ll need to have the right systems in place. Having a scalable IT solution like the one NetApp provides is one part of this equation.

Your company’s IT architecture should allow you to:

1. Simplify backups so that you know that your records are up to date, your staff is on board, and downtime is minimized.

2. Support testing and development efforts. Some tools are available for one operating system and not another. Web design work needs to be tested across numerous browsers and on a variety of platforms. Virtualization allows you to create all of the scenarios that need to be addressed on a single machine.

3. Improve storage efficiency with server virtualization so that you are able to use the tools you have rather than adding another server to the rack each time that you need more space or access to additional software.

4. Simplify recovery by ensuring that your data is stored securely and is available when you need it – whether you are in the office, on the production line, or in an airport on your way to a client meeting.

Opportunities present themselves in various ways. Being able to quickly pull up data, run comparisons related to two different approaches, and test products on a range of platforms will ensure that you’re ready to take action – and that you’re making the choices that best support your business goals.

As needs and the demands on your business change, will you be prepared to act? The right IT architecture – and support – will ensure that you’re ready and positioned to grow your organization.

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Top Five Business Reasons to Implement Virtualization

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

It isn’t easy to manage a heterogeneous infrastructure. If your datacenter is packed with disparate systems and cross-platform integrations, you need to maintain a variety of skill sets in your IT department – and it could take multiple groups to identify and resolve problems with your infrastructure. It’s easy for even the most easily managed problems to become taxing for your organization. A virtualized infrastructure – using Citrix XenServer, for example – can take the sting out of cross-platform management.

It’s a business decision first, so here are the top five business reasons to move to a virtualized infrastructure:

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Virtual Desktops: Get Past the Three Main Barriers

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

There are plenty of reasons to move to a virtual desktop infrastructure, and there’s no shortage of information on the benefits of centralized desktop control and management. It only makes sense that solutions like VMware View can streamline your IT operation, especially when you’re planning a major project, such as a Windows 7 migration.

So, why aren’t more companies doing it? What are the barriers to a virtual desktop infrastructure rollout?

Of course, a major infrastructure change isn’t easy to accomplish – even the decision-making process takes a while. Even though the business case is clear, there are a number of reasons why some organizations are hesitating to move forward with desktop virtualization.

Below are the three main challenges to VDI adoption, as well as ways to overcome them:

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Use Server Virtualization to Capture More Business Opportunities

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Did you know that virtualizing your server infrastructure could help your sales team? It’s no secret that there are some pretty clear business advantages to server virtualization, but it isn’t always easy to trace it directly to sales gains and client management. Think about how your clients interact with your sales force and customer care teams, though, and you’ll realize pretty quickly that the performance and reliability of your servers can affect your brand – which contributes to new and repeat sales.

Existing clients tend to be your best source of new sales. After all, it’s easier to use an established relationship to drive additional purchases than it is to break into a new account. So, “net-new” is extremely valuable and hard to achieve. To bring new business in the door, you’ll have to show that you can provide an excellent client experience, whether they engage your systems directly or indirectly (such as through a call center, with the rep using the systems to support a client transaction). In this regard, the IT department can affect the performance of the business as a whole.

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What You Need to Know about Cloud Computing

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Is cloud computing right for you? Maybe a private cloud? This virtualization-based approached to infrastructure management isn’t short on potential, but many IT professionals could use a bit more insight into how it works before committing to a cloud solution. As with any technology, there are advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take a look at whether cloud computing is right for your company … and what type.

Accountability versus Control
If you need complete control over your environment – but still want the advantages afforded by cloud computing – a private cloud computing environment is probably the most effective approach. It provides the flexibility and agility of a cloud environment, but without requiring that you rely on a third party completely.

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Take Back the Desktops!

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

The minute you put a laptop or desktop into an employee’s hands, you surrender all control. Sure, you use the usual methods to lock down access to certain websites and prevent some types of applications from being installed, but you can’t keep the image completely clean. There’s only one solution: take back control of the desktops! With desktop virtualization, you can put the IT department back in the driver’s seat.

Desktop computing has gained a reputation for being the “Wild West” in the IT community. It’s easy to keep the datacenter under control – from the sign-in log up front to the technical expertise required to manage the systems inside. Desktops, however, are fundamentally different. Your end users sit in front of them every day, making changes small and large. Even with extensive monitoring efforts, you usually don’t know about non-standard software or malware until a problem big enough to affect the employee severely occurs. And, what could have been an easy fix if identified immediately morphs into a time-consuming endeavor for the desktop support team, and the issues involved could affect your entire enterprise.

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Are You Over-Powering Your Virtualized Infrastructure?

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Your energy use may be higher than necessary, and it could be putting your equipment at risk. This probably seems counterintuitive for a virtual server environment; after all, a reduction in equipment should lead to a reduction in power. Yet, after virtualizing, you may have energy inefficiencies relative to your underlying physical infrastructure. This provides an opportunity for continued cost savings and risk mitigation, by optimizing power consumption for your newly architected virtual server environment.

The primary measure of energy efficiency in your datacenter is power usage effectiveness (PUE), reflecting total energy consumption relative to your physical equipment footprint. In a physical server infrastructure, energy consumption and costs are distributed over a larger set of hardware, much of which has loner latency periods. This drives a lower PUE. The equipment utilization efficiencies of a virtual server infrastructure, however, lead to less dormancy because of consolidation. Energy consumption relative to underlying equipment thus increases, elevating PUE.

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Beat the Heat: Optimize Cooling for Increased Server
Density

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Server and storage virtualization bring clear IT efficiency advantages to your datacenter. You can consolidate servers, reduce your equipment footprint and cut both new purchase and maintenance expenses. To make a virtualized environment effective, however, you need to be aware of the new set of risks you face and how you can overcome them.

Among the major challenges in a virtual server environment is the threat of heat – and the attendant importance of cooling – in your datacenter. Virtualized or not, this is a concern, but how you address it, and indeed the nature of the risk, is different when virtualization-driven efficiencies are at work in your company.

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Five Ways Virtualization Makes Your Company More Competitive

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Storage, server, desktop and application virtualization technologies can streamline datacenter operations and make your business users more effective in the marketplace. The judicious allocation of IT budget to virtualization investments provides an unprecedented level of IT flexibility and agility that has enterprise-wide implications. And with Citrix, you gain an integrated environment, which facilitates faster implementation and streamlined virtualization management.

While most IT professionals tend to focus on the technological advantages, the C-suite will want to know how these tools can benefit the business as a whole. To help you communicate the benefits of virtualization to business leadership, here are five ways that virtualization can make your company more competitive.

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