As data centers are populated with servers for every application or process in an IT environment it is important that organizations are aware of the benefits of virtualization technologies. Promedia is aware of the challenges that are occurring in data centers today and has partnered with VMware to provide a solution for consolidating a sever environment enabling the organization to realize major cost and administration benefits. Promedia is a VMware Premier partner and has certified VMware individuals on staff including VMware Certified Professionals, VMware Technical Sales Professionals, and VMware Sales Professionals.
Reduce Hardware Requirements by a 10:1 Ratio or Better
Using VMware vSphere, your organization can significantly reduce the amount of IT hardware in the data center. Each instance of VMware ESX can support more than 100 virtual machines.
In many of today’s data centers, there are servers that run different applications and software. Most of the time these servers were individually purchased to fill a specific role. Whether it was for email or the accounting and payroll system, these servers were installed one at a time leaving the majority of these servers underutilized. Most servers operate at only about 5-15% of their total load capacity.
When you consolidate your server environment you are combining all those different software and applications packages that in the past needed dedicated servers. These software and applications are transferred to a smaller amount of fully utilized physical servers with virtual servers within them.
Obviously, fewer physical servers mean less hardware to purchase and maintain, but the real savings for virtualized servers is in power consumption and real estate. Each physical server has power requirements and gives off a certain amount of heat. The heat generated by multiple servers in a small space poses a risk to your expensive data center equipment. The heat that is dispersed into the data center has to be managed and cooled, and more energy is consumed by the necessary cooling. Fewer servers means less money spent on energy consumption due to reduced power and cooling requirements.
Energy consumption is a critical issue for IT organizations today, whether the goal is to reduce cost, save the environment or keep your datacenter running. In the United States alone, datacenters consumed $4.5 billion worth of electricity in 2006. Industry analyst Gartner estimates that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they do on hardware infrastructure. The cost savings of virtualizing your environment can be significant—approximately $500-600 per server, per year. When totaled with the hardware cost savings and other capital reductions, virtualization solutions can help your institution save more than $3,000 annually for every server you virtualize.
While virtualization reduces the amount of hardware in the data center, freeing up data center real estate, you’ll still need tools and solutions for managing servers as virtual machines. VMware gives you the tools and power to manage your entire virtual infrastructure while providing even more cost savings. The ability to manage an environment from a single console cuts operational costs and can reduce the time it takes to deploy new IT services by 50-70%. You now have tighter control over your servers with the ability to install and configure new virtual servers in minutes instead of hours with traditional hardware.
