Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation
The Internet truly revolutionised the small and medium sized business, allowing them to behave like the big boys – on the Internet size and geographical reach no longer applied. Wowed by the ability to reach new audiences and bring about significant cost-savings to their operations, businesses embracing the Internet were often able to ‘leapfrog’ their competition by doing things faster, smarter, bigger and relatively cheaper.
We are now amid the ‘virtualisation’ revolution, where SMBs once again have access to ‘game changing’ technologies and technical know-how – until now only the province of large businesses – to give them greater agility and resiliency, simplify their IT and bring about environmental and hard-cash benefits.
For companies looking to achieve cost savings of 50% on their infrastructure costs, drastically simplify their server management, get new applications up and running in minutes and free up one third of a day, every day, of valuable IT man power to work on strategic rather than menial IT activities – it is not hard to see why companies can leapfrog their competition by virtualising.
Chris Norton, regional director from VMware southern Africa explains why virtualisation should be firmly on the minds of the SMB and why it is such a sound investment if outperforming the competition – not simply thriving the current market conditions – is the ultimate goal.
Recession or no recession, 1980 or 2009, a business’ commercial success is still based on the same principals: keep capital expenditure low, minimise operational expenditure, grow revenues and protect margins. But to stand still is not the goal of most businesses and investment and innovation is ever more critical – in order to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Like the adoption of the Internet and e-commerce among businesses in the 90s, which for the first time allowed companies to serve a global audience around the clock practically overnight, virtualisation offers the same appeal. With little capital expenditure required to start and tangible fiscal and operational benefits guaranteed, virtualised SMBs are no longer restrained by their IT and can now truly reach across the globe and run powerful 24/7 businesses.
Virtualisation is not a new concept. Gartner has stated that virtualisation will be the most important technology in IT infrastructures and operations up to 2010. It is also not new to SMBs, although not as vociferously embraced in the small and mid-sized business, possibly down to the fact many business owners are not at ease with technology, the business often lacks the technological know-how and internal resource – and quite simply because it is both considered time and money intensive.
However, virtualisation has been cited this year by many pollsters as one of the most fundamental IT investments an SMB should make to drive their businesses. And competition from larger businesses is one of the most compelling reasons driving an SMB’s IT investment.
In a nutshell, virtualisation allows business to regain the control of their IT resources. Typically today a server is only used at 10% of its capacity as it was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. Virtualisation lets businesses run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, so, importantly, from an IT perspective, storage and the network can be managed as a pool of resources and workloads can automatically switch between hosts thus ensuring no downtime.
Even without diving any further into virtualisation it becomes easy to understand some of the huge advantages for any company but especially so for the SMB: being able to do more for less by make existing hardware work harder; the ability to get services up and running quickly; using scarce internal IT resources far more effectively and no systems downtime for employees or customers using those applications.
Now, SMBs and the mid market can truly have serious technology with enterprise-class capabilities – at a cost that is relevant to this market.
Diving now deeper into the world of virtualisation, what is the bottom-line business case for virtualisation?
With costs being scrutinised more closely than ever, what are the economics in support of virtualisation? With this technology, the entry costs – that of the hardware itself – is not the most expensive part of the investment. The majority of the expense is in the long-term cost of operating and powering the hardware. However, small and mid-sized businesses that have implemented a virtualisation strategy can realise a return on their investment typically in six to nine months. Based on the energy-savings alone, purchasing a new server can provide a return on investment in just two years.
“We evaluated other virtualisation products including Microsoft Hyper-V and they just didn’t compare. In addition to all of the great features VMware offers, we can achieve a much higher VM density with VMware – close to 20 virtual machines running on one physical host – which translates to lower overall costs to run our applications.” explained Robert Cooley, operations specialist at Gradient Analytics.
Beyond the bottom-line, the simple fact that businesses need to purchase and run multiple machines, each machines often vastly under utilised but still requiring its own operating system and applications – simply no longer makes good business sense.
In a virtual world, resources are shared across multiple virtual machines and applications, bringing with it a myriad of benefits to the SMB. Through the intelligent sharing of computing, storage and information, resources can be allocated to where they’re needed; when they’re needed – thus allowing servers and storage resources to be used more efficiently.
IT services can be implemented in a much more efficient manner. Application workloads can be moved from host to host for maintenance. That means no downtime and unplanned downtime can be greatly reduced or even eliminated. And, from a disaster-recovery perspective, not only does virtualisation ease the process of planning for continuity and recovery, it also enables effective testing of those plans – with no downtime to the applications.
Notwithstanding the current economic plight of most organisations, no business can afford to be offline for a minute. Unplanned downtime is still a significant IT management concern, with many firms citing this as their number one issue. While average downtime costs vary considerably according to sector, industry and size of company, problems for online retailers – irrespective of size – can be seismic.
As a final point on the merits of to virtualise or not to virtualise, have a think about this. Companies who have moved beyond basic consolidation can significantly free up their IT administrators’ time to spend on the ‘innovation’ rather than the ‘maintenance’ which consumes most IT budgets. At VMware, we are seeing business freeing up one third of a day, every day, because of what virtualisation is delivering around flexibility, resource pooling and the simple ease of management.
Have a think about what you could do within your own business if you had one third of it free to focus on other things?
It stands to reason that the cost savings, time savings and efficiencies generate through virtualisation can create leaner more agile SMBS – truly capable of stealing a march or in fact ‘leapfrog’ their competition.
Leapfrogging competition with virtualisation << Comments and views
Chris Norton is the regional executive for VMware Southern Africa
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