Virtualization is the big equalizer

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Infrastructure is expensive. So it’s no wonder that many businesses traditionally would often spend the bare minimum to get up and running without considering their long term needs. Fast forward to today, and virtualization infrastructure is not only cheap to set up, it doesn’t require any major specialized knowledge to get started.

Even the smallest businesses (start-ups especially) generally have at least one or two servers that they use to host their services, but they’re generally only utilizing perhaps 10-20% of their potential capacity.
If SMB’s all took the opportunity to virtualize, they could scale their infrastructure with little burden on their capital expenditures. Since their existing infrastructure can be used, not only does it give them the opportunity to scale, is also allows the business to grow and build new environments alongside their existing ones.

Not only does it reduce capital expenditure, it also reduces operating expenditure. Since staff no longer need to manage a piece of hardware for every server and are able to administer their entire environment from their desks, staff efficiency is significantly increased.

Some studies have found that efficiency of staff can be increased by an average of 10%, but this can fly right up to a 270% increase, allowing a single administrator to oversee and manage 1800 servers. It also allows for faster deployment of new environments and applications, since a new piece of hardware isn’t needed to be provisioned. It’s as simple as pressing a button.

Additionally, these expenses are reduced further, since less floor space and power consumption is required for a cluster of virtual hosts over an entire datacentre of servers dedicated to a single task. VMware says that 70% of organizations have seen a “real measurable cost saving” from switching to virtualization, and it’s pretty easy to see why.

Initially, virtualization may require a slightly higher level of complexity to configure, since multiple hosts are recommended for failure resiliency and additional network equipment may be required to lessen the likeliness of a single point of failure, but the benefits pay off. This kind of work allows small businesses to boost their uptime as high as those that previously only a large provider could boast, such as 99.999%.

It truly levels the playing field, allowing start-ups and small/medium businesses alike to play on the same level as large providers that have significant money to invest in sprawling infrastructure. It opens up opportunities for start-ups who can’t afford to hire a team of engineers to operate their own infrastructure with 99% uptime.

Not only that, small businesses are the ones who experience the most explosive growth, and virtualization allows them to rapidly expand while keeping down both capital and operating expenditures for their projects.
If you haven’t tried to build your own vSphere environment just yet, we’d recommend you try it for yourself right now. It’s not as hard as you think, and the benefits are clear.