Looking to Reduce IT Expenses?

If you’re looking for ways to reduce IT expenses, a virtual server is well worth consideration. A virtual server enables multiple logical servers to share the same physical server hardware. What once required multiple dedicated physical servers can now be accomplished on a single physical machine.  A Qantel customer might set up a virtual server this way: one virtual machine runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the QICWARE environment and another runs Windows and is the main Print Connector machine. Other virtual machines would be your Windows file server, your email server and your web server.

Some reasons to consider moving to a virtual server:

Operating Costs

Server consolidation is one of the key benefits of moving to a virtual server. Expenses to operate – electricity, cooling, maintenance – a single server are likely less than what it takes to support several smaller servers. Less physical space is required for a single server as well.

Performance

A virtual server has greater system resources that are shared as needed among the virtual machines. Each virtual machine can have memory, processors, disk space, and other usage allocated to it. When allocated resources are not being used and are needed by another virtual machine, they can be shared on an as-available basis.

Efficiency

Hosting multiple virtual machines on a single physical server can boost utilization of system resources to 50% or even 80%, while a typical dedicated server may only be 5-10% utilized.

System Administration

With virtualization in place, system administrators are freed from hardware support and can focus on other tasks. Virtualization can also make software installation easier. Software vendors are trending toward delivering their products preinstalled in virtual machines (also known as virtual appliances), eliminating much of the traditional installation and configuration work associated with software.

Increased Uptime

For some operations, uptime is the most significant benefit of virtualization. A virtual machine can be taken down for service, upgrade, or replacement without causing downtime in the others.

Backups & Data Redundancy

Best practice demands regular backups and redundancy to protecting against data loss. Backups enable you to recover data, such as in the event of deletion or corruption. Redundancy protects data against failure in real time: each time data is written, it is stored in more than one place.

If your business demands near 100-percent uptime, any additional resources that may be required to achieve these benefits of virtualization may well outweigh the cost:

• ŸSnapshots of each virtual machine can be taken and uploaded to a backup server to eliminate downtime required for daily backup.

• In the case of a hardware failure (or scheduled maintenance of the server hardware), all of the virtual machines can “move” to another virtual server “on the fly” and may not even be noticed by end users.

• ŸBecause the hardware for each physical server does not to need to be in the same location, failure due to a natural disaster is mitigated. As an example, Qantel’s primary server is in California, while its redundant server is in Illinois.

Qantel Technologies itself and a number of QICWARE customers have shifted to virtual servers and are enjoying the benefits. Contact the Qantel Helpdesk or call us at 630.300.6997 with your questions about virtualization.