What can virtualization do for your business?
Posted by Sean Houghton on Wed, Dec 16, 2009
While all businesses, (especially SME's) continue to look for ways to reduce their 
costs, for many virtualization has become a key strategy for reducing expenditure.
Virtualization is a broad term but essentially it is the creation of virtual IT resources such as storage, server(s), a network, or even a workstation. For example you can take one physical server and run multiple instances of different operating systems on the one piece of hardware.
It is expected the use of virtualisation technology is set to increase by as much as up to 70% among SME's (25- 100 users) over the next 2 years
Here are 3 ways you can take advantage of Virtualization
Test applications on new operating systems
If you are worried how well your application will work on Windows 7 you can use virtualization to run a test environment. This will allow you to see how your application performs before deploying to the live environment.
Are you running a mixture of Mac's and computers? With Virtualization you can seamlessly run you Windows applications on your Mac.
Reduce your costs
Perhaps many people's favourite.
If you're running multiple servers in your environment over time you will save money on the costs of upgrades, maintaining the servers, rack space and power.
Cost effective disaster recovery
With the ability to transfer virtual machines in real time from one physical machine to another. Virtualization gives you a quick and cost effective way to recover you critical data and servers in the event of a disaster, potentially saving you thousands of pounds on a traditional High Availability solutions or a disaster recovery plan.