How your business can benefit from virtualization

Rampa Manoonsin

Web browsers, for instance, offered a graphical interface to information but also simplified remote access and application development. Virtual-isation, too, has benefits for a variety of technology challenges.

At face value, virtualisation is about doing more with less, allowing a fewer number of servers to do the job of many. It lets businesses partition system resources by creating multiple "virtual" servers on a single physical server.

Until recently, virtualisation was primarily used by larger enterprises to operate their data centres more efficiently. But research from IDC  shows the virtualisation-services market will more than double from 2006 to 2011, which indicates that even businesses that do not have vast numbers of servers can benefit from virtualisation, in these ways.

Lower costs: Because it reduces the number of physical servers, virtualisation reduces energy, hardware and administration costs as well as space requirements. At the same time, it also improves availability of backup data and legacy applications. It also means companies do not have to purchase additional hardware each time they implement a new application.

More effective server use: Compa-nies that buy a dedicated server for every application may end up with dozens of servers, none utilising its full capacity. By using virtualisation, these same organisations can reduce the number of servers they need while ensuring their servers operate at the most efficient capacity.

Improved availability: Companies can use virtualisation to create a testing environment and use its software to create a virtual server for older operating systems; they can maintain availability of legacy applications that hold crucial data.

Increased flexibility: As businesses grow, so do the needs of many of their applications. Virtualisation technology allows virtual servers to move easily from one physical server to another.

Streamlined management: Man-agement of components, such as fans, power supplies, motherboards, device drivers and platform firmware is reduced by server consolidation.

Simpler recovery: Virtual servers can allow back up and recovery to occur directly from a physical hardware device. This can eliminate the time-consuming task of having IT staff sort through backup tapes and deal with other problems.

Note: Rampa Manoonsin is the managing director of Sun Microsystems, Thailand. In this role, she is responsible for driving business opportunities, delivering revenue growth and winning greater market share in the country.