DATA, NETWORK & APPLICATION MANAGEMENT

Why virtualisation solutions? Simply put, it helps you optimise your IT asset landscape, improve utilization of your IT assets, reduces total cost of ownership (TCO), and help improve the management of your IT infrastructure a whole lot more. 

What are virtualisation solutions? Take an example of a server – a typical 24-core processor, with 256GB RAM, and a ton of GPU resources, which are typically too much for one application. Before the era of virtualisation, each application, database, or tool would have its own physical machine, which tended to explosively grow over time when enterprises scaled up their capacity.

Virtualization solutions help you abstract the physical asset and provision multiple virtual assets or virtual machines – this way, you can sometimes run as many as 10 or more applications, each requiring its own operating system and system resources, without having to invest in 10 different physical servers. 

The same applies to data. 

Storage servers can be virtualized; as can analytics tools, dashboarding tools, batch processes, data warehousing applications, and business intelligence tools; all can be virtualised either using a bare-metal or a hosted hypervisor.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM VIRTUALISATION SOLUTIONS?

Virtualisation solutions can significantly reduce your IT expenses while boosting the performance of your IT infrastructure. Moreover, virtualisation solutions can help improve your disaster recovery and give you a far smoother management of your failover systems. The question now, is how

You already know buying new software for your enterprise can be a costly and time-consuming task. So if you decide to keep your software running on older computers, you can use virtualisation solutions to keep systems running by reinstalling them on virtual machines. And with virtualization, typical service request management processes like provisioning, IMACDs and deployments are faster than physical servers. How?

• When you virtualise, you create a “virtual machine” or VM that is an image of the physical server, but running without the need for dedicated resources such as CPU, RAM, Network, Graphics, and Storage. The VM instead uses a portion of the physical server’s resources as allocated by the hypervisor, which is a tool that helps achieve just that. 
• VMs are created by features built into the hypervisor – which require no physical alterations to the underlying machine. You can run a command on the hypervisor (also a software application), which will in-turn do the job for you. This being the case, you can automate this function, thus enabling self service, integrated into a workflow, if you want certain approvals to be sought before the machine is provisioned or any changes to the machine (such as increased or decreased CPU, GPU, Memory, or storage). In turn, you now have significantly reduced workload on your server administration personnel, as well as your IT Service Management personnel, while also reducing the time it usually takes to provision a new machine or make changes to it, to a small fraction. 
• Managing becomes easier because, again, you have the hypervisor, which does most of the work, thus automatable, even orchestratable, meaning you can have robotic process automation scripts that perform maintenance functions based on the requirement, whether from your monitoring tool alerts, incidents, or service requests. Here you save cost, time, productivity, and improve overall asset performance 

HOW IVALUE CAN HELP?

One of the biggest challenges in virtualization is having a clear vision for it and adopting the right strategy, technologies, and processes. This is where iValue Virtualisation Solutions can help. 

For starters, we assess your IT landscape to understand what can be virtualised, how easily, and how efficiently, so you get the best benefit from virtualisation. Secondly, we work with you to identify the changes need to be made for your application landscape in order to get to your virtualisation goals. These include:

• Rehosting applications that have the capability to run on virtualised infrastructure
• Replatforming those that can be hosted on virtualised infrastructure with little modifications
• Refactoring where rehosting and replatforming doesn’t work
• Rebuilding or replacing applications, typically legacy applications, mainframes and other applications that typically are difficult to manage. 

We help you identify the most feasible, cost-effective, and efficient virtualisation strategy that will help you retain your enterprise agility and flexibility.