Many Small and Medium Business have yet to move to a virtualized environment. Many cite cost and complexity as primary detractors. In reality the virtualized environment is much easier to manage at a very competitive cost. For instance a physicians group may have a mail/file server and one or more Medical Office Management servers. With a properly designed virtual server and storage these can easily be virtualized cutting down the amount of hardware as well as power and cooling needed. For mission critical systems there can be a second virtual server that ghosts the first and will fire up the virtual machine, should the primary host fail.

Another small business needed an International presence in Europe for some web applications. It was built on two virtual servers with an iSCSI SAN back end. The entire system resides in a colo in London. The cost of the project including servers, licensing, firewalls, and network gear was under 32K. This system quickly paid for itself in the improved user experience from Europe and Asia.

The above was an example of a larger system serving a Software-as-a-Service model that required the uptime to eventually be very high. The virtual platform enables us to buy the lower end license now, and upgrade it on the fly later when the need for greater availability comes into play. You only pay for what you need now, not what you think you might need a year from now.

Virtualization for Small and Medium businesses can be a very logical choice at a very reasonable price. Contact us today so we can discuss your needs and potential for virtualizing your environment.