Virtualization of Everything - Server Virtualization, Storage Virtualization & More

Although this trend has been going on for a while, the rate at which businesses are virtualizing their core infrastructure has drastically accelerated!

Here are just a few reasons why…

Hardware Refresh – When the economy took a crap, IT budgets got whacked and IT had to hold on to their old equipment even longer. When this hardware finally dies or budgets get approved then IT is taking the opportunity to virtualize servers and storage as much as possible.

Reduced IT Staff – Many IT departments have shrank in staff due to layoffs. This helps companies save money but unfortunately the network still grows and requires lots of management. Because of this, businesses have rapidly began to take those dollars saved from layoffs and apply it to virtualizing servers to reduce the amount of management necessary for the remaining staff. This is a great way to reduce stress for the IT staff and also reduces the total costs to operate the network. (less staff, less power, less time spent supporting the environment)

Consolidation Movement – Over the last few years, the trend to pull everything back from a distributed network to a centralized network has drastically increased server and storage virtualization. Again, this helps reduce costs and get better control of your IT assets while delivering a more robust and fault tolerant IT infrastructure.

WAN Optimization (more on this to come) – The increased use of WAN optimization and acceleration has been a key driver in allowing consolidation and virtualization deployments to accelerate. Without WAN optimization technology in place in most environments it can be nearly impossible to virtualize and still deliver application performance that is acceptable by end users to continue to be productive.

New Demands – With new regulations, such as HIPAA, and increased network demands on storage environments in the “don’t delete anything” and “we need to up 24/7/365″ era, there has been a HUGE need to quickly virtualize storage environments, consolidate servers in data centers and more.

As you can see there are many reasons that organizations are streamlining their IT environments. It just makes sense to consider server virtualization, storage virtualization and even desktop virtualization in today’s IT infrastructures.

If you are considering virtualization, disaster recovery or even looking to buy new servers it makes a lot of sense to have someone look at the big picture and help you develop a strategy that will allow you to begin consolidating on a small scale with a plan for what the network will look like and how it will operate when the “virtualization of everything” is complete.