Server Virtualisation

Very few servers are in constant demand, and even those that appear to bear heavy loads and seem to be in use continually are, in fact, often sitting idle.

Adopt a more innovative approach to deploying and managing your servers. Reduce your costs and increase your control, agility and responsiveness by reducing the quantity you use.

Why see any given Server as a physical entity - where one box is the mail server, another is the web server and so on? Why not regard the servers in terms of the work they do and the services they provide?

This change in approach leads almost inevitably to virtualisation, where multiple, software-based servers are logically stored on a single machine.

Even if a web server serves up a page every second, it may take only a fraction of a second to do that. So the machine’s processor is still doing nothing for much of the time. Other applications - for example, payroll or billing systems - may have long spells of inactivity or light use interrupted by bursts of activity. Overall, a physical server will usually show percentage of CPU usage in single digits. Worse still, there may be applications that are entirely redundant. And there may be others that are run just every now and then.

With virtualisation, you’re able to clone existing servers, and make the applications they run available as a standard, pre-packaged system that you can roll out in a timely manner.

With virtual servers, which share the available resources, you can fine-tune each server as needed. If your web site suddenly starts getting more hits than you expected, or a rush of orders means your order processing system is under heavy load, you simply reassign resources appropriately, in next-to-no time. All the time you ensure that you are making the maximum possible use of your computing resources.

Server Virtualisation Solutions

Citrix Xen Virtualisation

Xen is a unique open source technology invented by a team led by Ian Pratt at Cambridge University (who subsequently founded XenSource) and developed cooperatively by the world’s best engineers at over 20 of the most innovative data centre solution vendors.

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VMWare Virtualisation

VMWare has long been a dominant force in the virtualisation arena and, by many, isregarded as the benchmark against which all other virtualisation platforms must compare.

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More information

For additional information please contact one of our experienced sales or technical staff who will be more than happy to discuss the options with you.