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Virtualisation Services: Why Virtualise?

Why virtualise your servers?

More IT managers and decision makers are leveraging virtualisation as an essential strategic part of their ongoing IT infrastructure.

Whether the need be cost reduction, consolidation, outsourcing, or deploying new applications – some of the benefits virtualisation bring include:

• Maximising the use of hardware.
• Not paying for resources that go un-utilised.
• Lower cost of ownership compared to physical servers.
• Being able to rapidly test new software and “undo” snapshots of servers.
• Rapid provisioning of new servers.
• Development & test environments.
• Disaster recovery.

What is virtualisation?

Virtualisation is a proven software platform which is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way servers and data centres are deployed.

Today’s powerful computer hardware was originally only designed to run a single instance of an operating system and it's application – but virtualisation allows multiple, individual operating systems and multiple applications to run on the same physical computer hardware, increasing the utilisation and flexibility of today’s powerful server farms.

When a server is virtualised, it’s hardware set is standardised – which means there is less hardware exposed to the operating system, meaning fewer drivers and fewer bits of software to potentially cause a system crash. Because the hardware set is standardised, hardened drivers can be installed into the virtualised server, increasing efficiency and reducing the likelihood of errors.

High Availability Hosting use virtualisation software and platforms from VMware and Microsoft.

Ensure business continuity

Thousands of businesses world-wide experience significant service interruptions every year, at the cost of reputation, data, or revenue. Disasters can be small such as a power disruption, or major as in the case of flood or other natural disaster; but the most common form of disruption to business continuity is either planned or unplanned downtime caused by server maintenance or hardware faults.

By virtualising your data centre, you can ensure continuity of your IT systems with:

• Data protection – including SAN storage and non-disruptive backup & restores.
• High Availability – hardware and network redundancy is built-in from the ground up.
• Disaster recovery – with hardware independent recovery procedures.
• Better stability – through reduced planned and unplanned downtime.

Virtual is green!

Powering a server is more than just plugging it into the mains. When you add up the total cost of powering the server, network and storage, air-conditioning, data centre overheads, security etc... the cost can be over £1000 per year, per server!

When virtualised however, each hosted server takes as little as 20% of the energy that a physical server needs. Severely reducing the carbon footprint your IT infrastructure takes up.

Virtual servers vs Physical dedicated servers

Hosted virtual servers deliver better availability than physical servers because they can be migrated live from one cluster node to another with no downtime.

Hosted virtual servers are also easier to scale and upgrade hardware. Hosted servers offer Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) advantages over physical servers because the virtual hardware can be upgraded and refreshed dynamically without substantial investment in infrastructure.

Virtual servers vs shared hosting

Hosted virtual servers are superior to shared hosting or a virtual private server (VPS) because they get their own dedicated operating system and are fully isolated from other servers running on the same physical hardware.

Hosted virtual servers are more secure because each virtual server is completely abstracted from the hardware and isolated from other virtual servers.

Basic cost comparison

This is a basic cost comparison of 10 physical servers, compared to 10 virtual servers hosted on our infrastructure, over a typical 3 year refresh cycle.

	Traditional physical	H.A. hosted virtual
No. of servers	10	10
No. of physical servers	10	1 / 2 dependant on load
Servers inc maintenance	£20,000 (£2000 / server)	£19,440 (£54 / server / month)
OS costs	£5,000 (£500 / server)	£4,320 (£12 / server / month)
Power / Air con / racking	up-to £30,000 (£1000 / server / year)	£0
OS management / support	up-to £15,000 (£500 / server / year)	up-to £9,000 (£300 / server / year)
Total	£70,000	£32,760

Notes:

• £55 per month per server price assumes discounted hosting for 10 servers.
• Managed Firewall free of charge.
• Internet costs not included.
• OS assumed; Windows 2003 Standard, Windows 2008 Standard, CentOS 5.
• Up to 50 users assumed.

Contact us

To virtualise and migrate your servers to our Data Centre, contact us directly to discuss your requirements.

All prices exclude VAT.