Efficiency & Protection
Consolidation
At its most basic, server virtualisation is about consolidation of Physical servers. The traditional method of purchasing a Physical server for every application utilised in an organisation has led to an under-utilisation of Physical Server capacity. It is Castle’s experience from having undertaken numerous Capacity Planning exercises to find that on average only 7% of Physical Servers are utilised when used this way.
Server virtualisation takes the operating system and applications on a server and turns it into a flat file which allocates CPU and memory resources to it. This means that as many as 10 or more servers can be comfortably accommodated on a single Physical Server, leading to reduced power consumption, reduced space requirements, an improved operating temperature, less hardware maintenance costs and reduced depreciation of assets.
This technology is now extremely well established. Issues around software licensing and application support in a virtualised environment that existed at the outset with this technology are now by and large redundant.
Business Continuity & High Availability
Server Virtualisation has the capability to make organisations’ IT infrastructure much more robust, protecting them in the event of a failure, from day-to-day technical problems as well as if disaster strikes.
Virtualisation software can manage physical server crashes by automatically moving the resident virtual servers to another physical server without the user being aware of a problem. This can happen within an organisation’s datacentre or in the event of a disaster affecting an entire location or building, it can switch to an off-site replicated datacentre, with down time measured in minutes.
The software optimises performance by balancing the load of virtual servers on each physical machine based on the respective sizes of the virtual servers and the individual specifications of the physical servers.
There are practical improvements that lead to increase robustness also, fewer physical servers and the use of virtualisation-friendly hardware such as Blade Technology leads to a reduced operating temperature in the server room and the simplicity and extra space overcomes previous issues caused by complex wiring.
The de-coupling of the data storage from the processing power of the servers, using SAN (Storage Area Network) technology introduces more protection for data, eliminating many single points of failure and through SAN to SAN data replication to an off-site back-up datacentre or to a Private Cloud datacentre previous concerns regarding recovery of data back-ups are overcome.
Smaller organisations with small numbers of servers, not able to benefit from consolidation, have virtualised them for the Business Continuity benefits alone
Management
The system has management tools that are designed to save time and increase the operational flexibility of the organisation.
When previously it might have been commonplace for there to be periods when applications are not available or for IT staff to work long into the night, upgrades and testing can be done on copies of servers, enabling much of the work to take place during the day. Problems with servers can be rectified via a single dashboard
Organisational flexibility can be dramatically improved through the provisioning of new servers by creating them from flat file templates of whichever type of server required, including Windows, Linux, Redhat etc.
Taking the first steps
Castle’s Capacity Planning assessment assesses your infrastructure and models your organisational requirements based on your strategic objectives, to provide you with recommendations and options designed around you.
