Virtualization: Does it Make Sense for Small or Mid-Market Companies?
Posted by Mark Lennon on Tue, May 03, 2011 @ 07:00 AM
If you’ve spent any time researching virtualization, you’ve probably heard the big promises:
Save money. Save time. Minimize your IT footprint.
And some of the reported benefits are quite impressive:
- A 2008 IDC survey found that virtualization allows companies to reduce hardware costs by 20% and realize average annual cost savings of 23%.
- The same survey found that companies that have implemented advanced virtualization spend an average of $23 annually per user on IT staff, compared to $66 for companies that have not virtualized.
- According to a commonly cited statistic, virtualization can help you increase overall hardware utilization to 80-85%, with related cost savings.
- According to IBM’s David Vaughn, storage virtualization can help increase disk utilization by up to 30%.
It’s not hard to imagine how enterprises with massive server farms can benefit from virtualization. But do any of the commonly-cited benefits of virtualization actually apply to small and mid-market companies?
Five Can’t-Miss Benefits of Virtualization
At least five of the major benefits of virtualization clearly apply to companies of any size:
- Cut hardware costs. Despite the ever-falling price of hardware, it’s always a plus to avoid hardware purchases by hosting multiple virtual machines on each physical server.
- Reduce power costs. Fewer physical servers means less power used. That’s a bottom-line benefit no company would want to miss.
- Speed up server provisioning. From purchase to installation, physical servers can take weeks to deploy. Virtual servers deploy in minutes. With virtualization, any IT staff can become dramatically more responsive to the needs of the business.
- Improve IT staff productivity. As you reduce your IT footprint, you’ll also minimize the need to hire more IT headcount. If you can keep your IT-to-employee ratio favorable now, you’ll avoid the need to “optimize” it later.
- Free up IT to focus on strategic projects. With fewer physical servers to manage, your IT staff will have more time to devote to the projects that help your company grow.
Three Additional Benefits of Virtualization
Several other benefits of virtualization may or may not be applicable to small and midsized companies, depending on their situation:
- Reclaim space. For a company that’s only running 15 servers, cutting back to three servers may or may not free up significant floor. Every company's situation is unique. It could make a very meaningful difference for some companies that were running out of space for more servers.
- Avoid building out your data center. Smaller companies often have server rooms rather than data centers, and are therefore less inclined to undertake costly expansions in the first place.
- Improve business continuity and disaster recovery. Yes, smaller companies can use virtualization to help them get back up and running quickly after a disaster. Having fewer servers often makes it easier to make a business case for a higher level of disaster recovery planning for the remaining servers.
Crunch the Numbers
For enterprises that run large server farms, virtualization is almost a no-brainer from a financial standpoint. Your small or midsized company can benefit too – but before you launch a virtualization initiative, crunch the numbers. Figure out which technology will give you the fastest, most reliable return on your initial investment. And remember that once you’ve gotten started with virtualization, the technology will continue to pay dividends in the form of avoided costs in the future.
For further reading on this topic, download the free white paper titled, "Why Virtualization Matters for Small and Mid-Sized Companies".
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