Virtualisation Consultants

Virtualisation is the currently hottest topic within the IT arena and is something that will benefit us all in the coming months and years from efficiency, financial and green/eco perspective. What is Virtualisation? - Virtualisation is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute.

Virtualisation essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations,freeing you from physical and geographical limitations. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high availability of resources, better desktop management, increased security, and improved disaster recovery processes when you build a virtual infrastructure.

There are six areas where virualisation can be applied, and in each we have partnered with the leading Vendors affording us the ability and expertise to provide the right virualisation solution for your organisation.

Storage Virtualisation
With storage virtualisation, storage capacity is removed from the individual user or server and is instead deployed in single or shared pools. Storage capacity is allocated to and accessed by the user or server via the network and can be adjusted to meet actual demand at any given time. Proactively managed by the IT team, disk space can be fully utilized without wastage. Capacity planning, data classification by importance, backup and restore and peak-time balancing all become easier.

Server Virtualisation
Server virtualisation dramatically reduces the number of physical servers in an organisation by enabling multiple ‘virtual servers’ to be run on a single or reduced number of shared machines. Each virtual server has its own operating system, applications will run as normal, and users have access via the network as usual. Multiple virtual servers are managed via a single management layer, or ‘hypervisor’.

Desktop Virtualisation
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) consolidates large estates of desktop PCs onto a centralised server farm where every user has their own ‘virtual’ PC. Instead of users having an expensive, dedicated, fully loaded PC on their desk, they all access a full version of the operating system (Windows, Linux...) environment, including desktop applications, located remotely on the server. They do this from much lower cost ‘thin client’ PCs or terminals.

Application Virtualisation
Application virtualisation dramatically reduces the number of physical servers and desktop PCs in an organisation by enabling multiple applications to be run on a single machine, or a reduced number of servers, contained within a dedicated server farm. Applications share system resources such as operating system, memory and processing power, with workloads balanced to ensure optimum performance.

Network Virtualisation
Through network virtualisation, a dedicated ‘acceleration appliance’ is deployed at each end of a network connection. This increases data transfer speed and the capacity of the connection without the expense of adding extra telecommunications bandwidth. Network acceleration underpins wider virtualisation strategies, enhances remote backup and disaster recovery performance whilst improving large file transfers and the overall user experience.

Security Virtualisation
Virtualised security appliances are necessary in order to apply the same rigorous access control, authentication and content checking as traditional security appliances from within the virtual platform. Because of the increased risk due to multiple systems being located on a single piece of hardware, security must be a priority area when looking at virtualisation and consolidation. Virtualisation touches every aspect of the IT infrastructure – data centres, servers and networks – and security must be factored into the virtualisation strategy to ensure that only the right people access the right information at the right time.

In short Virtualisation is essentially a software solution that connects and manages multiple storage resources enabling easy allocation of data storage capacity, application control and Network Management across multi-vendor storage systems as and when required, via a drag-and-drop interface.