| Virtualization and the SMB |
| Sunday, 22 April 2007 23:18 |
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The SMB market often times lags in the technology adoption space. This has been true with MS technologies, storage technologies, Linux and many other areas. While a cautious position, it keeps many small businesses from being able to have a competitive advantage in the use and application of technology. Virtualization is an area where SMBs have the ability to change the trend. Virtualization technology enables small businesses to implement new servers and server technologies without necessarily purchasing new hardware. The cost savings is only a small part of the story however. More importantly, virtualization technology enables small businesses to implement nimble and effective disaster recovery plans. The use of this technology with low cost storage solutions with replication features enable these business customers to implement their DR environment that in a way that is only fantasized about by large enterprise businesses. Virtualization technology enables small businesses to implement new servers and server technologies without necessarily purchasing new hardware. The cost savings is only a small part of the story however. More importantly, virtualization technology enables small businesses to implement nimble and effective disaster recovery plans. The use of this technology with low cost storage solutions with replication features enable these business customers to implement their DR environment that in a way that is only fantasized about by large enterprise businesses.Another area where virtualization technologies can give the SMB customer a comptetive advantage is in the test/dev environment. Few small businesses that have in house software customization ability have the resources to build a full test/dev environment for testing. Through the use of virtualization technologies, these small businesses can now create these test environments and even seed them with clones of the production servers. When looking at server virtualization technologies there are a few viable soltuions that work with the typically older hardware that can be found in the typical SMB enviornment. The technology FRS recommends is VMware's Virtual Server product. This free product provides a robust virtualization environment with an easy to operate interface. The Virtual Server platform creates virtual machines that can be later imported into a VMware ESX server environment as well, thus providing and upwardly mobile platform. For more information on how virtualization can help your small business, contact David Byte at Future Reality Solutions, LLC. |