Virtualization is a proven technology that is rapidly transforming IT Infrastructure and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Essentially, one or more of the following five kinds of virtualization – employed independent or in combination – reduces your dependency on physical computing devices:
- Hardware virtualization allows more than one Operating System to simultaneously interact with one set of hardware.
- Operating System virtualization, sometimes also called container-based virtualization, enables multiple Operating System instances that leverage the same source to consume fewer resources.
- Application virtualization separates the individual applications from the host, simplifying the installation, management, update, and removal of applications by eliminating their direct links into the Operating System.
- Network virtualization enables one physical network to be broken into multiple virtual networks, or for using software to virtually network machines without the use of traditional network devices.
- Storage virtualization enables advanced storage management functionality such as combining the storage capacity of multiple devices into a single, logical storage device. Data storage virtualization can also enhance the provisioning, backup, and disaster recovery of storage through replication and snapshotting capabilities.
Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of your resources and applications. Through our virtualization solutions, you can employ your precious IT resources to respond to business priorities faster and more efficiently. However, an effective virtualization strategy requires a balanced understanding of the current IT environment, consideration of the impact of data center consolidation beyond the server layer, and a deep understanding of how IT serves a particular business – today and into the future. With two decades’ experience with IT Infrastructure, Managed Service, IT Consulting, and High Availability Data Centers, Consonus offers an unparalleled understanding of what it takes to optimize the virtualization opportunity.
The Consonus Approach to Virtualization
An effective virtualization strategy will mitigate risk while expediting Return-On-Investment (ROI). The Consonus Virtualization solution process is to first develop a roadmap for enterprise consolidation and virtualization – as well as detail the steps for building the business case to rationalize it. The Consonus assessment process identifies fiscal and organizational challenges and risk, and culminates in a detailed technical approach. This technical approach includes recommended methodologies for assessing viable data center consolidation and virtualization management targets, assessing the impact on a central data center, and the impact on IT from a management and process perspective.
For example: simply by virtue of the network virtualization connections between servers and storage, data backup and recovery present bottleneck challenges. When you consolidate backup and recovery for 10 servers to one network connection, the bottlenecks can become severe. Consonus virtualization management corrects these limitations, enabling you to maximize the full potential of your IT assets.
When executed in a properly cohesive way, virtualization positively impacts backup and recovery, storage management, networking, server management, and high availability. Consonus ensures that you leverage every virtualization service technique, so that you will be well on the path to world-class Disaster Recovery.
The Consonus Bottom Line
Consonus Virtualization customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating resources. That’s at least half off your current IT costs!
Consonus achieves this ROI by enabling you with an optimized IT infrastructure that embraces a variety of hardware, operating systems, applications, and network configurations. Consonus Virtualization reduces cost and complexity and serves as a foundation for better availability, manageability, and recoverability. With Consonus Virtualization, your IT environment will benefit from:
- Flexibility. With Consonus Virtualization, your Operating System no longer needs special configuration for the installed hardware. And you will be able to manage complex network and storage systems management activities without costly and time-consuming physical reconfigurations.
- Transience. Consonus Virtualization makes it much easier to replicate configurations or even entire instances between devices. Because the Consonus Virtualization configuration resides in software rather than the physical computing devices, your systems administrators can easily extend and expand the network.
- Commonality. Virtualization of all types reduces or eliminates the need for many types of low-level customizations traditionally required with physical systems. This means you can quickly replicate the Consonus Virtualization configuration to meets the needs and demands of your business. Virtualization further reduces complexity across the IT environment because configuration commonality speeds incident and problem management.
Consonus’ Virtualization and Consolidation Assessment is based on our unparalleled IT Consulting methodology. This assessment combines a quantifiable analysis of the current server, storage, network and application state with forward-looking definitions of business and service requirements. We utilize capacity planning tools to collect performance and utilization metrics in your IT environment to generate data center consolidation scenarios through the following four strategic phases:
- Assess: Applications, impact, data migration requirements, implementation, and IT support needs
- Build: Architecture planning to foment higher utilization of storage and server assets in your IT environment. Effect economies by consolidating the number of systems and tools supporting those systems. Standardize, update and upgrade process across the organization to ensure better manageability and availability, as well as accelerated response and resolution.
- Manage: Streamline monitoring to accelerate identification of issues, and reduce the number of interfaces for IT staff to manage, virtual data center sources to correlate, and changes to control.
- Support: Simplify administration through data center consolidation. Accelerate problem resolution through greater knowledge of computing ecosystem and relationships between OS, server, storage, file system, etc…
Virtualization is more than merely leveraging physical assets. Consonus Virtualization addresses every relevant aspect of efficiency, integrating staff, process, and environmental considerations into the overall objective:
- Virtual Data Center
- Data Storage Virtualization
- Server Virtualization
- Desktop Virtualization
- Database Management
- E-mail Archiving
- Data Backup
- Virtualization Management/Monitoring Environment
- Expert Staff
- Virtualization Service & Support Contracts
Consonus’ qualitative requirements gathering enables us – and you - to define and prioritize current and forward-looking business and IT service requirements. We present our findings, including detailed technical data center consolidation scenarios with associated ROI, followed by a strategic roadmap, organized around our four strategic data center advancement areas.
Benefits of Consonus Virtualization
The primary benefit of Consonus Virtualization Management is that it enables you to operate your computing resources in an organized, consolidated fashion – saving you money by leveraging existing IT equipment and resources. In addition to the myriad other considerations, Consonus focuses on an optimized backup and recovery strategy that enables Disaster Recovery.
For example, Consonus helps you understand that you can effectively leverage your test/development assets for Disaster Recovery. This means that you are able avoid the burden of the additional IT investments that others will tell you are required for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
Other essential benefits of Consonus Virtualization Solutions include:
- Reduced Cost, immediately and over the long term
- Fewer assets, systems, and facilities to support
- Greater utilization of each asset
- Less complexity and sprawl to manage
- Consistent system personalities to manage reducing variability
- Controlled license costs
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Decreased utility costs, such as for power and cooling
- Right-sizing of resources for workloads
- Elimination of legacy hardware
- Improved Efficiency through Standardization
- Better Customer Service and Support
- Faster provisioning of new capabilities
- Increased agility through remote hosting
- Streamlined Collaboration and Information Sharing – across all platforms and business locations
- Optimized Process Improvement and Manageability
- Organizes disparate IT environments, such as after a merger and acquisition M&A
- Enables Simplification or “Complexity Reduction”
- Supports IT maturity models
- Reduces sprawl
- Greatly eases security and regulatory compliance
With Consonus, you will benefit from Virtualization with an optimized IT infrastructure that embraces a variety of hardware, operating systems, applications, and network configurations. Consonus Virtualization Management can reduce your IT costs – by an average of 50 to 70% - and simplifies your IT environment so that you can realize improved availability, manageability, and recoverability.