Virtualisation

What you need to know about virtualisation

Used the right way, virtualisation can be a powerful way to drive down costs and increase flexibility. With an experienced partner like Conosco, it's becoming a feasible option for growing businesses.

At a glance

• Save costs by reducing the number of physical servers
• Increase reliability by keeping critical servers separated
• Reduce downtime
• Environmentally friendlier

The benefits of virtualisation

By reducing your number of physical servers, we reduce your upfront capital expenditure and installation costs. Whether you're a startup or have ageing servers, virtualisation can radically reduce your IT budget.

Similarly, the running costs of virtual servers are lower, due to fewer physical parts to maintain and replace, and with less power consumption they are greener.

The nature of virtual servers allows us to set them up quickly from templates, so your servers can adapt quickly to your business's changing needs, and reduces downtime when upgrading hardware and software.

How virtualisation works

A virtual server platform allows you to run multiple virtual servers on top of a single physical server. Virtualisation is rapidly being adopted by large organisations seeking to reduce their hardware costs and increase flexibility.

For reliability, we prefer a business to run each of its central applications (such as Exchange or SQL) on its own server. But few applications use the power of a whole server - most servers rarely use even 10 per cent of their capacity. This represents a huge waste of capital, power and support costs. The answer is to get many 'virtual' servers to share one physical server.

This allows allows each server to share a large pool of computing power, so that each can call on large resources during peak loads, but sharing the cost of that capacity across all the servers. So you reduce costs as well as being kinder to the environment.

With virtual servers we can also run up new servers at short notice and make disaster recovery planning less expensive.

How Conosco can help

We run our own virtual server platform where you can rent cost-effective resources and we run dedicated platforms for larger customers.

Please contact us for a more human explanation of this complex area!