Clients large and small have been telling me that “this is the year of doing more with less.” Well, the timing is right for just that in the IT space and we are a living example of it.
This month completes the server consolidation project in our office. Using the miracle of virtualization, we have dropped our power-hungry, heat generating server count from 18 to 9 without losing any functionality. Less servers means that our utility bill will go down, the HVAC will not have to work so hard, and we have given a big boost to our disaster recovery and business continuation strategy.
For those not familiar with virtualization, it is the ability to run more than one server operating system on a single piece of hardware. It eliminates the old ratio of 1 OS =1 physical server, and makes it anywhere from 1:2 to 1:4 or more.
The disaster recovery benefit comes from being able to make lightning-fast backups of virtual images, and deploy them (literally drag and drop) on whatever hardware we want without having to reload from scratch and restore.
If you are interested in knowing more about server virtualization and doing more with less in 2010, give me a call at 503-241-3499 and I will be happy to stop by and see if we can save your company money on IT this year.
Thanks for reading!
DJ Δ