The Promise of Virtualization: Data Center Technologies for Today and Tomorrow

Virtualization is the hot topic in enterprise IT today - and with good reason. It enables data center managers to make far better use of compute resources than in non-virtualized environments, and enables an enterprise to maximize its investment in hardware. In fact, underutilized hardware platforms and server sprawl - today’s norm - can be things of the past. By virtualizing a large deployment of older systems on a few highly scalable, highly reliable, enterprise-class servers, you can substantially reduce costs related to hardware purchases, provisioning and maintenance.

But virtualization offers more than server consolidation benefits. Rapid application deployment, dynamic load balancing and streamlined disaster recovery top the list of additional benefits. Virtualization technologies can reduce application test and deployment time from days or weeks to a matter of hours. This is because you can test and qualify software stacks in isolation but also in the same environment as the production workload. Virtualization abstracts the operating system from the underlying hardware, allowing virtual machines (VMs) to migrate freely between servers. This means that virtualization with policy-based automation can help you balance workloads and more efficiently use your compute resources, including power, storage, I/O memory, network bandwidth and more.

Download this whitepaper, here.