How Virtualization Can Improve Your Business
Finding ways to improve the efficiency of your business is one of the greatest tasks you will have. There have always been plenty of technological developments come forth to help businesses achieve greater efficiency. Virtualization technology is one these tools and it is helping companies all over the world in many ways.
One of the main ways virtualization can increase the efficiency of your company is through consolidation. Running on a lot of servers? With virtualization technology you will be able to consolidate them significantly. Depending on how many servers you are currently using, you may even be able to bring that number down to one but most likely a pair of servers for redundancy. As you can imagine, running on a single server could reduce costs in many ways, not just hardware. From energy consumption to space and management resources, the smaller the number of servers you can run on the better.
With virtualization you can feel good knowing that your resources are not going to waste. Often times, companies with many servers will have many of those servers just waiting around to be used, while others continue to run applications that are not being used anymore. Moving these to virtual servers will free up the resources being used to run them.
Another great benefit to virtualization is efficiency. Tasks that used to take several hours can now be done in minutes. New servers are flexible and can quickly respond and be made to adapt to current situations and circumstances. The flexibility that virtualization technology provides allows for proper load balancing and resource allocation.
When you have the capability to move virtual machines around it provides many options to redirect data loads according to the needs of the business instead of IT requirements. Data Loads can be managed evenly over several different locations, or focused on only a couple, which will then allow the idle machines to be powered down.
Because virtual resources will be able to reside in a more refined software region you will have more flexibility to put many of the time consuming IT management jobs into an automated process. Things like data mapping and backup will need to be automated due to the fluidity of the virtual environment.
Let's not forget about the cloud. Once you have adopted virtualization technology you have to option to use cloud computing solutions. Whether you choose to use external, internal, or a type of hybrid solution, the ability to virtualize physical resources is what makes it all possible.
One of the main ways virtualization can increase the efficiency of your company is through consolidation. Running on a lot of servers? With virtualization technology you will be able to consolidate them significantly. Depending on how many servers you are currently using, you may even be able to bring that number down to one but most likely a pair of servers for redundancy. As you can imagine, running on a single server could reduce costs in many ways, not just hardware. From energy consumption to space and management resources, the smaller the number of servers you can run on the better.
With virtualization you can feel good knowing that your resources are not going to waste. Often times, companies with many servers will have many of those servers just waiting around to be used, while others continue to run applications that are not being used anymore. Moving these to virtual servers will free up the resources being used to run them.
Another great benefit to virtualization is efficiency. Tasks that used to take several hours can now be done in minutes. New servers are flexible and can quickly respond and be made to adapt to current situations and circumstances. The flexibility that virtualization technology provides allows for proper load balancing and resource allocation.
When you have the capability to move virtual machines around it provides many options to redirect data loads according to the needs of the business instead of IT requirements. Data Loads can be managed evenly over several different locations, or focused on only a couple, which will then allow the idle machines to be powered down.
Because virtual resources will be able to reside in a more refined software region you will have more flexibility to put many of the time consuming IT management jobs into an automated process. Things like data mapping and backup will need to be automated due to the fluidity of the virtual environment.
Let's not forget about the cloud. Once you have adopted virtualization technology you have to option to use cloud computing solutions. Whether you choose to use external, internal, or a type of hybrid solution, the ability to virtualize physical resources is what makes it all possible.
If you would like to learn more about virtualization technology, or related topics like cloud computing news, please visit VirtualizationPractice.com.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_A_Hasson 
A Simple Perspective on Innovation in Application Performance Management
Everybody agrees that end-user Response Time is the most important metric for judging application performance (or the more popular term App performance in the recent days). We will just refer to it as response time in this article. The conventional definition of response time is the time elapsed between a user clicking on a button/hitting a return key and getting the results that she is expecting. Another way of defining it is the wait time the user experiences when she is involved in the same operation.
The most important direct factors that contribute to response time are the size of the data bytes of the result, bandwidth in the network path, network conditions (such as packet loss), network latency and application chattiness, and server load. One can measure the response time by implementing some instrumentation in the user machine or simply by clocking the time sitting next to the user. When the App runs slow and the response time is long, it generally means that the direct factors mentioned above are causing this slowness. One can trouble-shoot by focusing on these factors and hopefully fix the problem.
But things are not simple anymore. There is more good news but some bad news. The good news is that there is lot of innovation in speeding up or accelerating applications. Remember when your friend asked a complex puzzle to solve and you gave an instant answer that amazed him and you appeared a lot more brilliant than you really are (the truth of the matter was somebody had posed the same puzzle a few months ago and you could not solve it in days - finally gave up and got the answer from that person).
Somewhat similar to the above situation, an App such as an Internet browser might have cached the image you were trying to download and might surprise you with instant result - this is an example of caching. There are many more techniques that are emerging in the Application Performance Management (APM) space to speed up or accelerate applications. Examples are compression, TCP optimization, proxying/chattiness reduction, pre-fetching, using Content Delivery Network (CDN), etc.
Big web portals are constantly innovating to enhance end-user experience. Google, for example, is always at the cutting edge of providing almost instantaneous response time. When you are searching for key words Google expects that you are likely to click next on the first of the ten results and it can pre-fetch that link while you are still thinking and moving your mouse. When you actually click on the first link, the results are already there in your computer and there is instant gratification. Notice that this would not work if you happened to click on the third or the fourth link.
This is all good news and we can get used to great response times both at home, at work, and on the road. The only bad news is if something goes wrong in this fast-lane (like a traffic jam) how do you trouble-shoot the problem? It, sure, will be lot more complex than in the simple world before.
It is imperative that the tools that help trouble-shooting App performance issues and the experts who do the trouble-shooting keep up with these rapid innovations. Also it is important to get direct feedback from the end-users (through trouble- ticketing systems, automated surveys, etc.). Together they should hopefully be able to fix the response time issues fairly quickly. Otherwise the end-users will be in alternating states of agony and ecstasy.
The most important direct factors that contribute to response time are the size of the data bytes of the result, bandwidth in the network path, network conditions (such as packet loss), network latency and application chattiness, and server load. One can measure the response time by implementing some instrumentation in the user machine or simply by clocking the time sitting next to the user. When the App runs slow and the response time is long, it generally means that the direct factors mentioned above are causing this slowness. One can trouble-shoot by focusing on these factors and hopefully fix the problem.
But things are not simple anymore. There is more good news but some bad news. The good news is that there is lot of innovation in speeding up or accelerating applications. Remember when your friend asked a complex puzzle to solve and you gave an instant answer that amazed him and you appeared a lot more brilliant than you really are (the truth of the matter was somebody had posed the same puzzle a few months ago and you could not solve it in days - finally gave up and got the answer from that person).
Somewhat similar to the above situation, an App such as an Internet browser might have cached the image you were trying to download and might surprise you with instant result - this is an example of caching. There are many more techniques that are emerging in the Application Performance Management (APM) space to speed up or accelerate applications. Examples are compression, TCP optimization, proxying/chattiness reduction, pre-fetching, using Content Delivery Network (CDN), etc.
Big web portals are constantly innovating to enhance end-user experience. Google, for example, is always at the cutting edge of providing almost instantaneous response time. When you are searching for key words Google expects that you are likely to click next on the first of the ten results and it can pre-fetch that link while you are still thinking and moving your mouse. When you actually click on the first link, the results are already there in your computer and there is instant gratification. Notice that this would not work if you happened to click on the third or the fourth link.
This is all good news and we can get used to great response times both at home, at work, and on the road. The only bad news is if something goes wrong in this fast-lane (like a traffic jam) how do you trouble-shoot the problem? It, sure, will be lot more complex than in the simple world before.
It is imperative that the tools that help trouble-shooting App performance issues and the experts who do the trouble-shooting keep up with these rapid innovations. Also it is important to get direct feedback from the end-users (through trouble- ticketing systems, automated surveys, etc.). Together they should hopefully be able to fix the response time issues fairly quickly. Otherwise the end-users will be in alternating states of agony and ecstasy.
Apsera Tech, a premium APM consulting company, has years of experience in networking and application performance management. It has helped Fortune 1000 companies in diverse industries such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and publishing in planning/resolving critical business application performance issues like slow application response time, WAN optimization and WAN acceleration.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Henry_Stevenson 
