If you are a small- or medium-sized business (SMB) in Southern California, then you know that every penny counts when it comes to business technology investments. You need to make sure that you are maximizing the capabilities and getting the most value out of your technology. Managed virtualization solutions can help you do this, enabling you to save money on hardware costs, reduce energy consumption, and improve the efficiency of your IT system.
Here are some of the most significant ways virtualization can benefit your SMB:
Lower your costs
Virtualization allows you to reduce the number of physical servers that you need. This translates to lower hardware and software costs, less need for specialized IT personnel, and a simplified information system that is cheaper to own and run.
Purchasing a server for your business can cost you anywhere between $1,000 and $10,000 for the hardware and software alone. If you factor in staff required to operate and maintain your system, as well as the daily overhead costs, the total expenditure can get out of control before you know it.
By contrast, you can have access to a virtualized IT system by subscribing to the services of a reputable managed IT services provider (MSP) like USWired. In this arrangement, you get the benefits of a full-sized IT system without heavy upfront costs. You also won’t need to hire extra IT staff or pay for maintenance and overhead of several machines.
Decrease your energy footprint
You can use virtualization solutions to consolidate servers into fewer physical machines to reduce power consmuption. So aside from lowering your power bill, you can feel good knowing that your business is not expelling emissions that harm the environment.
In addition, many newer virtualization solutions include features that allow them to be more energy-efficient than traditional servers. For example, VMware’s vSphere has a feature called Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) that can help you optimize your energy use. DRS balances computing workloads with available computing resources to ensure that no one component of your virtualized environment is carrying too large a load and is drawing too much power.
Improve your IT system’s efficiency
You can reduce the number of applications and services that are running on each server with the use of virtualization solutions. For example, you can use virtual machines (VMs) to efficiently provision servers, making server deployment faster and more flexible. This is because server provisioning via VM can be accomplished in hours or days, and not the week or two it takes on a physical server.
And you don’t even have to migrate all of your software to your virtualized environment; you can just run a hybrid arrangement wherein your mission-critical applications are hosted on your physical server, while your accessory applications are virtualized. This allows your business to experience the best of both worlds, giving you the control you need for your most important pieces of software while maximizing limited resources and minimizing your costs.
In addition, a virtualized environment can improve overall performance. USWired’s virtualization solution is notable for fast provisioning and dynamic load balancing, which optimize app performance. And because the system also streamlines server workload allocation, you get to accomplish more with fewer physical servers.
On top of these benefits, USWired’s VM solution is a great way to boost your disaster recovery profile while simplifying the recovery process. This is because virtual machines can be restarted more quickly than traditional servers, which means that your business will be able to get back up and running faster in the event of a disaster.
Explore the benefits of a virtualized environment with help from USWired’s team of virtualization experts. We’ll give you the lowdown on the opportunities and positive impact of virtualization on your specific business profile. Contact USWired today to schedule an assessment so we can get your business started on the path to a virtualized environment.
