Venyu Blog

If you ever find yourself engaged in a verbal donnybrook with someone who holds an opposite position on an issue and your opponent pulls out the “Look at the big picture” card from his hand, know immediately you’ve lost the debate. Utterly. Definitively. It’s as if the “small stuff” (devil-in-the-details type thing) is just no longer relevant to the argument. At that point there’s kind of nowhere else to go but down to the mat in defeat. (I can almost hear Howard Cosell now: “Down Goes Frazier! Down Goes Fraizer!”)

Writing in onestopclick.com with content extracted from the 2011 Server Virtualization Buyer’s Guide for Small and Medium Businesses (you can access this complimentary guide here), Benjamin Gran writes that when it comes to server virtualization the core reason most SMBs virtualize their servers all boils down to the same reason: to increase efficiency. To extract increased efficiency from their existing servers and improved reliability from their existing servers (e.g. server crashes are going to happen and downtime can be costly – the average cost of an hour of server downtime Gran estimates at $23,186). And staff that simply spends too much time dedicated to managing too many servers. Gran cites research from VMWare that found 9 out of 10 IT departments spend a majority of their time on routine tasks such as “adding and managing new server workloads, adding new employees or developing and launching new applications.

In turn, Gran suggests that setting these day-to-day burdens in managing servers aside, as a data administrator you need to look at the “big picture” to identify and isolate those long-term outcomes that make server virtualization a worthwhile consideration for your enterprise. These include:

Improved server utilization: Server virtualization helps SMBs make more efficient usage of their server space by consolidating multiple physical assets onto one virtual system.

Reduced total cost of ownership of IT assets:  Server virtualization can reduce costs both in terms of capital expenses (cost of buying new servers or installing a new server farm) and in ongoing expenses (lower monthly energy bills for powering/cooling a data centre, lower labour costs for the IT department).

Improved security and reduce risk of crashes: Server virtualization leads to more secure servers, less downtime, and better business continuity.

Reduced staff time devoted to server management: This is one of the hidden benefits of server virtualization, in that it can often transform the IT department from a “maintenance team” performing routine tasks, to a more responsive “strategic” team that can help the business focus on higher level goals.

And how do these “big picture” features figure into the real-world? According to a survey from leading virtualization provider VMWare, there are many reasons why SMBs are deciding to virtualize their servers. Here are the top-cited reasons, in order of prevalence:

• Improve server utilisation (cited by 72% of SMBs)
• Reduce or contain the number of servers (57%)
• Improve security (49%)
• Improve availability and uptime (48%)
• Improve server and application management (47%)
• Improve data backup and protection (47%)

Gran and his research discovered that the primary reason SMBs choose to virtualize their servers is not simply to achieve cost savings or to improve server utilization, but for broader (e.g. “big picture”) operations, not the least of which is the added flexibility and agility in how they use IT assets. Indeed, taking into consideration my depth of experience in speaking with data administrators day in and day out, if you remove the mundane tasks of routine server maintenance from your workload, you then have significantly more time to apply your talents and skills to high-value tasks that improve the overall productivity, quality and response time of your enterprise.

Simply put, don’t sweat the small stuff. While your enterprise will probably come out on top, from a personal point of view, you’ll lose every time out.

If you’d like to learn how server virtualization can help improve your datacenter’s (and for that matter, enterprise’s efficiency), contact Venyu today.