Virtualisation has become an essential consideration for UK businesses looking to squeeze IT costs, according to a White Paper published by data centre specialist MDS Technologies.
Available to download at http://www.mds.gb.net/our_company/about/whitepaperfocus, the whitepaper highlights an explosion in demand for the technology with 64 per cent of European and US companies likely to have some form of virtualised servers by the end of 2010.
Phil Dawson, Managing Director of MDS Technologies, describes the underlying principle of virtualisation: “Simply put, it increases the number of functions a single computer server can carry out making it possible for one virtualised machine to replace several non-virtualised ones.
“Equally, non-virtualised servers typically work at only 10-15 per cent efficiency but use the same space and power as a virtualised system, running at far higher levels of efficiency. Our White Paper provides companies with the information to understand the technology without the need for a PhD in IT.”
Accompanying the burgeoning demand for virtualisation is a shrinking availability to house servers, with 15% of data centre managers reporting zero remaining capacity and needing to build new or refurbish existing facilities.
For MDS Technologies, which operates outsourced data centres across the South of England, a variety of clients have taken the decision to virtualise servers to great financial and operational benefit.
Navman Wireless, for example, a leading supplier of vehicle tracking systems opted to switch to a fully virtualised server environment in 2007.
The switch led to a reduction in hardware requirements from 10 servers down to three, and a corresponding drop in costs to purchase, host and power the servers.
Barry Neill, IT Director at Navman Wireless, said: “Our decision to switch to virtualised servers has, unequivocally, been worth the effort.
“Our hardware and software costs have fallen, we can run updates to all our machines simultaneously saving considerable time, plus our servers are more reliable meaning our customers experience greater uptime and we get improved customer satisfaction ratings.”
Helping to further bolster its service offering to clients, MDS Technologies’ has announced that virtualisation specialist Robert Whitmore has joined the company as Chief Infrastructure Engineer.
Robert brings with him a wealth of IT experience and joins the MDS team from Hewlett-Packard.
