What is Virtualization?

One of the few cases where going green saves you money, makes your business infinitely more efficient, flexible and secure, shortens your ROI and makes disaster recovery a snap is Virtualization or “Cloud Computing”.

Think of it this way. Most businesses have numerous desktops, running various programs, often independent of each other. Each Desktop has a CPU, which is basically a server for that particular desktop, utilizing around 5% of it’s capacity while sucking up 500 Watts of electricity for the remaining unused 95%. When person “A” wants to show Person ”B” something, they have to email, load a disk, card or thumb drive to transfer the files. Any number of things can go wrong, from person “B’s” desktop having problems converting the file, to lost, misplaced or stolen data, viruses and on and on. As good as they are and as much as we need them, today’s computers are sometimes an IT nightmare for small businesses.

What Virtualization can do for your Business!

Imagine having a single server, a virtual machine (VM), running at an amazing 70% or greater efficiency, with every program from every desktop in the business loaded onto it. Now, get rid of every single electricity guzzling CPU from each desk and replace it with a book sized “Thin Client” that simply ties the keyboard and screen to the VM while sipping only a meager 8 Watts of electricity. Tie every single thin client together so they can stream to the server; give the entire package High Availability (HA) which in lay terms means little or no down time. For good measure, throw in a doubly redundant backup that saves all of your vital information more securely than any desktop ever could.

That’s just a tiny sampling of what Virtualization can do for your business. Bur wait, it gets even better!

Right now, if one of your desktops or network gets a virus, and you don’t have tech on hand, you have to call in an IT person. Start the clock when the car starts and just pray there’s no traffic jam, all the while one or all of your employees are chatting on what a pain the system is. 4 to 6 hours and $400.00 to $600.00 later, you might be online, you might not. .Even with an in house tech, you’re still down. You get the point.

With a virtual machine, every event results in a “snapshot” of the entire system. Say you get a virus in your VM. All that’s required is to go back and look at the snapshots until you arrive at the one just before the virus. With the press of a button, the system is completely restored to pre-virus settings, and usually in just a few minutes. No harm-no foul. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, call us and we’ll remotely get you back on line immediately, 24/7/365. No reloads, no trips to the office, no hassle. And what’s more, no one has the kind of service guarantee we do. If we can fix it during normal business hours remotely in under five minutes, it’s free, our way of saying thanks.

Imagine a bad hard drive on a desktop, if it fails and you don’t have backup, you’re hosed. If it still works, your $100.00 and hour IT person has to save the files to an external drive, shut it down, replace the unit and reload it. Another 4-6 hours of work lost and repair money paid.

With your VM, there’s an extra, dormant hard drive built into the system. If one fails, the standby drive starts up, absorbs the data and seamlessly keeps on going. Your employees won’t even know that everything automatically transferred. When it’s convenient for you, we will come in and simply swap out the bad one without even turning the server off.

Talk about versatile, you can be working on a project in your office, and need to physically check the warehouse for a doohickey.. You simply sign out, go the warehouse, log in and you are back at your desktop, from the warehouse.

If you need to access your associates calendar, easy. Do you want to restrict the receptionist to only certain areas? Easy. Do you want to keep certain information from being downloaded? No problem.

If you leave your laptop in a taxi, someone could have access to all of your critical data. With a VM, the laptops holds nothing because you are securely logged into your server, and after the session, the server keeps the information, not the laptop.

The reliability of a VM is only eclipsed by its versatility.

Say business is good and you want to add three additional work stations. With a VM, it takes less than an hour to get all three up and running. It’s cheaper, quicker and more efficient than any desktop. When it’s time to update or add programs, we do it for you, from our office, no business interruptions or on site service calls. A huge time and money saver.

With the ability to run numerous virtual workstations off a single server, a dramatically reduced electrical bill, virtually zero downtime and little or no in-house IT work, coupled with unbelievable flexibility and unrivalled performance, why wouldn’t you do what tens of thousands of small and medium businesses have done, and go virtual? PC is old tech. This is the future, and it’s here now.