Virtualization helps you take back control of your infrastructure. That’s because virtualization enables you to see and manage your computing resources in ways that offer more flexibility; you’re not being restricted by implementation, location or physical packaging. With virtualization, you have a logical rather than a physical view of data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources. By gaining greater control of your infrastructure, you can improve cost management.
While cost saving is a primary driver for initial virtualization deployment, the full value of virtualization lies in its ability to:
- Improve total cost of ownership (TCO) — Virtualization offers a rapid return on investment (ROI) through decreased management costs and increased asset utilization. You can enhance system availability and help lower cost and complexity of disaster recovery solutions by virtualizing resources for a flexibility, dynamic infrastructure.
- Increase flexibility — By enabling vendor choice, virtualization supports the pooling of resources that can be centrally managed through an enterprise hub to better support dynamically changing business requirements.
- Enable access through shared infrastructure — Virtualization provides a resilient foundation and shared infrastructure that enables better access to infrastructure and information in support of business applications and services oriented architecture (SOA).
Companies of all sizes are aggressively adopting IBM virtualization solutions to help with:
- Infrastructure simplification — Virtualization can help eliminate infrastructure sprawl through the deployment of virtual servers and storage that run securely across a shared hardware environment. Consolidating to a virtual infrastructure can enable you to increase server utilization rates from 5 - 15 percent to over 70 percent, thus helping improve your ROI. And a simplified infrastructure can help you lower management costs with a common management platform and tooling.
- Rapid application deployment — Virtualization can help enable rapid infrastructure provisioning (minutes compared to days). It can help developers to speed application test and deployment, enhance collaboration and improve access to the infrastructure.
- Business resiliency — Virtualization can help IT managers secure and isolate application workloads and data within virtual servers and storage devices for easier replication and restoration. This added resiliency can provide IT managers with greater flexibility to maintain a highly available infrastructure while performing planned maintenance, and to configure low-cost disaster-recovery solutions.
- Managing a virtualized infrastructure — Managing a virtualized infrastructure — The IBM Systems Director family offers the right system management platform and common tools to support virtual and physical devices. IT managers can address configuration, deployment, monitoring, workload management and additional management functions in a consistent and common way across their infrastructures. This can help simplify problem determination, increase productivity and lower management costs.
IBM takes a holistic approach to virtualization by working across all resource types, leveraging decades of mainframe experience, embracing diversity of resources and integrating the virtual and physical worlds. We can help you virtualize not only your broad physical infrastructure, but your application workloads and information as well.
Virtualization allows you to freely mix and match technologies through common management tools for managing distributed heterogeneous resources. This added freedom offers capabilities to lower switching costs, add flexibility and freedom of choice, and mask complexity. Not having to manage each computer or resource separately — but managing them together, virtually — allows for significant improvements in utilization and administrative costs.
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