The majority of data centre servers only use between 7% -15% of their capacity.  With such headline grabbing statistics, it is not surprising that there has been a rapid growth in Virtualising technologies that compartmentalise a single physical machine in to a number of ‘virtual machines’ offering a number of potential advantages.

Including:

• Reduced spend on IT hardware.
• Reduced data centre footprint, electricity consumption and cooling costs.
• Reduced data centre complexity and management time.
• Reduced server downtime as virtual machines can be moved to new physical machines in real time to allow routine and emergency hardware maintenance without service interruption.
• Improved disaster recovery with SAN based mirrored replication.

The exponential growth in storage, streaming technologies and the spiralling cost of managing the increasingly complex infrastructure necessary to ensure application and data availability have all strengthened the case for centralising storage and virtualisation, however, virtualisation is not for everyone. The commercial and operational benefits will not be realised by every organisation and detailed application usage analysis is required before virtualising your data centre. Computer Assurance can help you establish whether it works for you.