Virtualisation

What is virtualisation?

Virtualisation transforms physical network devices, infrastructure, servers and storage into virtual components, allowing organisations to consolidate IT equipment, increase utilisation and reduce costs.

How can virtualisation help your business?

A virtual host system is a physical server, running specialised software, that shares its processing capacity, memory and storage with many virtual machines (VM).

Virtual machines have many advantages over multiple physical servers;

• Hugely improved utilisation of hardware and lower energy use, reducing costs
• Easily add new VMs for testing or production as required
• Quickly add additional processing power, memory or storage to a VM
• Safer operating system and application upgrades, using storage snapshots
• High availability, multiple virtual host systems combine to ensure that services keep running in the event of a hardware failure
• Zero downtime backups

While virtualisation is a really great solution, it sometimes raises so many questions that it is difficult to design the right architecture for your specific business needs. This is where Blueloop’s expertise is vital to ensure that you implement the right solution for your business.

What are some of the business benefits?

Avoiding down-time is critical for many organisations and public sector operations. High availability virtualisation meets this need with multiple host systems attached to shared storage, typically a Storage Area Network (SAN). If one systems fails, another can take over without any interruption to services.

Keeping off-site backups of virtual machines allows IT systems to be quickly recovered in the event of a disaster. VM backups can be quickly restored at another location and made accessible over the network so that employees can keep working.

How Blueloop can help with virtualisation projects

Blueloop has many years of experience in advising clients on the most suitable IT Solutions to meet real business needs. Our advice is backed up with extensive technical skills;

• We are experts in designing, delivering and supporting complete virtualisation solutions using established software from VMware and Microsoft, along with hardware systems and storage.
• We provide a complete Backup and Replication service built for virtualisation and using industry leading Veeam software.
• Our Disaster Recovery services enable your backups to be restored within our own data centre, allowing you to recover quickly if a disaster should occur in you business.