A switch from the traditional physical server sprawl to virtual servers will provide your IT department with a powerful tool for solving critical IT challenges. The expected rewards for successfully meeting these challenges merits the change and can inspire and enable your IT staff to achieve new levels of efficiency, response time, data security, and equipment utilization, among other benefits.
Five IT Problems Server Virtualization Can Alleviate
1. Limited IT Personnel. Because every physical server requires individual attention, distributed physical servers add stress to IT personnel that can be avoided with server virtualization. With the streamlined management made possible with virtualization, IT personnel can be more productive and creative.
2. Downtime and laggard performance. Maintenance, repair, and upgrading of internal servers results in productivity-sapping downtime and periods of slow system performance. Often, identifying a problem can involve troubleshooting that has negative ripple effects throughout your IT infrastructure.
3. Slow fulfillment of IT requests. Overburdened IT staff often cannot respond with sufficient promptness to service requests. Server virtualization facilitates the reduction of response times.
4. Data vulnerability. With physical servers, it’s usually a costly and complex process to back up and store data offsite for disaster recovery. Virtual servers eliminate the need to duplicate your production infrastructure.
5. Captive, underused, and aging servers. Using virtual servers frees IT from the responsibility of managing these machines and allows old servers to be repurposed.
Key Points
- The payoff for taking advantage of server virtualization includes the ability to overcome persistent IT challenges.
- Server virtualization can motivate IT personnel who see the opportunity to improve their workflow, learn new skills, and boost company productivity.
- Virtual servers lead to increased efficiencies in areas such as faster IT staff responsiveness, less lost production due to server issues, better utilization of existing hardware resources, and less-expensive, less-problematic data storage.
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