Is Virtualization the Right Choice for your Financial Institution?

 Author: Chris Sutherland, csutherland@jackhenry.com

Virtualization…so what is it? Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of your IT environment’s operating system, a server, or resources.  In today’s world of power hardware, it is not uncommon for servers to use less than 10% of their capacity.  This is one key reason why IT organizations are considering virtualization of some, or even all, of their computing infrastructures.  Virtualization helps them derive the biggest “bang” of their proverbial computing “buck.”  Virtualization works by inserting software called the “hypervisor” or the virtualization layer.  The hypervisor performs the mapping between the virtual and physical resources.  It is what enables the various resources to be dispensed, regardless of the underlying hardware, and in some cases, the software OS.  In effect, the hypervisor takes over hardware management from the operating system.

Now, why should virtualization be considered by today’s businesses?  There are five main reasons to consider virtualization:

• Get more out of hardware resources.  By letting several virtual servers share a single set of hardware resources, a much larger average of utilization rate is achieved, and hardware and support cost of that hardware can be lowered.
• Reduce Data Center costs.  In today’s world, people need to control or cut costs, and virtualization can assist here, too.  By centralizing and virtualizing servers, you can reduce the amount of real estate space needed to house the equipment.  Less servers and less space lead to less HVAC, power, and possibly even less administrative overhead.
• Increased Availability of servers and data.  With the proper configuration you can gain increased availability and uptime.  With products for High Availability, you no longer need to schedule time after hours for system down or service calls.  You have the ability to migrate guest servers to available working hosts and perform your maintenance or fix damaged equipment.
• Gain operations flexibility. Have you ever heard the words, “I have a program that I need YESTERDAY!”  Virtualization makes it easy to provision and reallocate servers.  Using pre-existing templates, you can create servers more efficiently and quickly adapt to market changes and needs.
• Improved desktop management and security.  Within a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, you are  provided with environments that can be accessed locally or remotely, with or without network connections, from almost any standard PC, laptop, or tablet PC.

Virtualization is definitely one of the hottest topics in the IT Industry today.  There are lots of things to consider when looking into virtualization, so it is not something that is to be taken lightly.  You should do your research and talk with consultants to help you address your particular environment’s needs.  For more information, check out the ProfitStars free webinars about virtualization at www.profitstars.com.