You’ve heard about virtualization, sharing computing power, and how this can reduce your cost of infrastructure but what is all this techno-babble about really…
Remember when you heard about mac users being able to run Windows in their MacBook? Sounds crazy, no? Why not just buy a PC? Well, it started when the younger folks decided they wanted to play the same games as their friends but they also wanted to have a Mac. Apple decided to create an environment where your youngster can run the Windows XP software on your Mac so the game “Rainbow 6” could be installed and played against their friends across the Internet but you still have your Mac to do video or page layout. Does this ring a bell?
So now it’s advanced quite a bit. Example: In the past, your company had a server for the network and a server for email and a server to store files and a server to do spam filtering and another server…well, you get the idea. Then the price of hardware dropped and the performance picked up and suddenly you could buy a server that could actually run all that on one piece of hardware. But how? Enter virtualization. Now servers can have the processing power and storage space split so as to have two or more servers running on one piece of hardware and sharing that power. Pretty cool, huh? Saves your company money by buying one instead of two or more.
But there are gotchas to that like anything else. Enter Hyper-V and VMware and XenCenter among others. And just like that virtualization became even more complex.
“Buy from vendors who fit your solution to your environment and budget. Don’t fit your environment to your solution.”
Technology agnostics are who we are at Hi-Impact Technology. We aren’t interested in selling you a race car when you need a truck. We want the right fit for the right situation. Navigating the waters of virtualization is not for the newbies. Either you wind up with something that is overworked because it wasn’t sufficient or you wind up with overkill and over budget. Make sure you consider all the facets of virtualization like SAN’s and other storage options.Make sure you have fault-tolerance and redundancy built in. We can help you navigate that for your budget and your needs.