Virtualization-as-a-Service

Managing your Virtual Server Environment

What are the benefits of virtualization? How does it help? By engaging mindSHIFT to manage your virtualized servers, you will realize several benefits of virtualization -- most notably cost savings and increased data availability. mindSHIFT managed virtualization will consolidate your servers and enable you to

focus your IT efforts on more strategic initiatives
save energy and capital equipment costs
increase hardware utilization by up to 10 times
enable continuous uptime with high availability
recover nearly instantaneously (vs. hours or days) from hardware and software failures

In fact, according to Forrester Research, improving disaster recovery capabilities is actually the number one driver for server virtualization, even edging out cost savings.

Is Virtualization Right for my Organization?

Why Virtualization-as-a-Service?

The primary reason that virtualization-as-a-service is better than on-premises virtualization is that you don't have to deploy and maintain the infrastructure yourself. You can utilize the investment mindSHIFT has made in our enterprise infrastructure. You will be able to:

obtain a secondary site for Disaster Recovery (DR) without the upfront costs of a secondary site
access a fully redundant site and enterprise infrastructure at small business price
avoid capital expenditures of new servers and SAN

Virtualization-as-a-Service also allows you to utilize mindSHIFT’s 24x7 NOC (Network Operations Center) to do OS (operating system) patching and application monitoring – allowing your business to run smoothly day and night.

mindSHIFT’s consistent processes enable you to extend your IT team and fully leverage your resources.

24x7 resources allow you to sleep better at night knowing your infrastructure is always being watched.

Most importantly, you can add additional value to your company by focusing on strategic IT initiatives and not the nitty-gritty details of virtualization (as well as other technologies, if you so choose).

The mindSHIFT Approach

Using the industry-leading VMware platform, mindSHIFT deploys, manages and supports your organization's server environment.

mindSHIFT ensures your server capacity needs are met by delivering the highest levels of performance, scalability and redundancy.

Just as mindSHIFT manages other aspects of the IT infrastructure, we also offer centralized management of virtual servers. Virtual server management not only offloads the somewhat tedious and mundane tasks of server management, but it also saves money and provides a fantastic Disaster Recovery solution -- without the upfront costs of a secondary redundant site.

With virtual server management from mindSHIFT, customers have the option of an on-premise solution, or a fully hosted environment in a top-tier data center.

Contact us for more information.

Virtualization can Reduce Costs

By utilizing a single physical server to run multiple operating systems, multiple server functions can run on a single system and yet remain independent, not impacting the other resources. This capability enables organizations to realize significant cost savings in many ways, including

reduced hardware costs
reduced operational costs
decreased downtime

Various studies indicate that most servers are less than 10% utilized. Virtualization software managed by mindSHIFT reduces hardware costs by improving utilization and consolidating servers. As a result, you can dramatically reduce the number of servers required and get more out of each server, cutting your spending on server hardware and the ongoing support and maintenance costs associated with each device.You can also avoid the costs of purchasing your own SAN (Storage Area Network), Combined, this can result in dramatic savings in capital and operating expenditures.

Savings in IT operations costs with virtualization can, in many cases, be equal to or even greater than the savings in hardware costs. The reduction in the number of servers leads to dramatic savings on power and cooling costs, as well as savings in the area of network and storage infrastructure (SAN, network switches, cables and administration).

Virtualization from mindSHIFT can also significantly reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. When hardware maintenance is required, for example, you can move live, running virtual machines from one host to another while maintaining near continuous service availability. Thus, running virtual machines can simply be moved to and from other physical servers during planned downtime. When unplanned downtime occurs, the amount of downtime and the costs associated with it are dramatically reduced because hardware-independent virtual machines can be rapidly recovered and restarted on any hardware.

Virtualization Provides Disaster Recovery

Most disaster recovery plans require building an exact duplicate of servers and applications, requiring the purchase and maintenance of extra servers that are mostly idle.

Because VMware virtual machines are hardware independent, they can be consolidated onto fewer physical servers. There is no need for duplication of equipment. As a result, there is no need to exactly duplicate production server hardware; companies using VMware software can implement disaster recovery plans for critical applications with significantly fewer servers -- and gain the confidence of fully redundant systems.

Benefits of Virtualization Realized by Representative Customers

	Benefits of Virtualization	ROI over first six months	Reduction in TCO
Regional healthcare organization	Significantly reduced hardware costs for servers supporting its physicians. Avoided a costly data center upgrade through server consolidation and improved server utilization.	289%	74%
U.S. insurance company	Stopped server sprawl. Enabled IT to provision servers more quickly.	189%	65%
National transportation business	Addressed problems with scalability and manageability of servers through virtualization. Eliminated old hardware, improved server utilization and made legacy applications easier to support.	449%	82%

Source: VMware

Less Power Equals More Green

By optimizing existing systems, and reducing the need for additional servers, virtualization translates into real savings in the footprint size of the system infrastructure. With a reduction in footprint is a reduction in power and cooling costs. Using less power and less hardware to support ever-increasing workloads is an important green strategy. Contact us for more information.

Virtualization-as-a-Service from mindSHIFT

With virtual server management from mindSHIFT, customers have the option of a customer premise solution, or a fully hosted environment in a top-tier data center. mindSHIFT has built and can provide a multi-tenant virtualized environment or we can design and implement a dedicated virtualized solution just for you.

mindSHIFT ensures your server capacity needs are met by delivering the highest levels of performance, scalability and redundancy.

Features of the management service include:

Fully managed virtual servers
24x7 proactive monitoring
- disk space, CPU and memory utilization
- hardware availability
Assessments of the relative merits and risks of implementing specific VMware updates
VMware patch management
Troubleshooting and resolution

Features of the hosted virtual server service include:

Dedicated virtual server in a top-tier data center
Enterprise infrastructure at small business prices
Minimal upfront costs
On-demand capacity
No need for a secondary site for full redundancy

Additional Resources

Is Virtualization Right for my Organization?

A server virtualization solution can be effective for many companies. As long as you have more than one server, you can take advantage of the consolidation benefits virtualization brings.

Virtualization can be a good solution if your organization:

is experiencing space and/or power constraints inyour corporate network or data center infrastructure
needs Disaster Recovery
faces an upcoming hardware refresh
has an infrastructure to support your software development initiatives
is seeking a hosting alternative
needs to provision new servers quickly
has underutilized processing capacity

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