Doing More with Less: Virtualization, Cloud and Recession-Proof IT
The National Bureau of Economic Research recently declared that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. The news would be darkly amusing if it weren’t so utterly painful. But now that the recession is official, this seemed to be the ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help recession-proof IT.
Consider the following tips:
Virtualize infrastructure to increase capacity utilization. Traditional server infrastructure tightly couples applications to hardware, wasting computing capacity whenever applications utilize less than 100 percent of system resources. Virtualized infrastructure decouples applications from hardware, freeing excess capacity for use by other applications. A single virtualized server can often support 5X the workload of a non-virtualized server. This allows IT to consolidate server infrastructure, which reduces capital costs associated with server acquisition and datacenter infrastructure, as well as operating costs associated with management, maintenance and energy consumption.
