How to Future Proof Your IT Infrastructure in 2023 

Cloud, future, new technology, Ophtek, proof your IT infrastructure, security, virtualization, , , , , , ,
05
Sep 2023

Technology advances at a rapid pace, and this means you need to build scalability into your IT infrastructure to maintain future productivity. 

Businesses need to future proof their IT infrastructure to ensure long-term success and sustainability. After all, technology is constantly evolving, and failing to adapt can result in outdated systems which hinder growth, productivity, and competitiveness. But if you adopt a culture of future proofing, you can minimize this risk by using new technology to enhance scalability and maximize your productivity. Implementing scalability, however, is easier said than done. And that’s why we’ve decided to give you a head start with some suggestions. 

The Best Future Proofing Methods for Success 

If you want to make sure that your IT infrastructure remains relevant and keeps one eye on the future, make sure you adopt these best practices for future proofing: 

For more ways to secure and optimize your business technology, contact your local IT professionals. 

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5 Benefits of Virtualizing a Server

Office IT, virtualization,
16
Dec 2014

Virtualizing_a_server

Virtualizing a server can bring many benefits spanning cost, power savings, ease of management and business continuity.  Here’s what you should know.

Since we’ve been exploring the meaning of virtualization in some of our past articles, let’s quickly re-cap what it is for those of you who need a gentle reminder.

A virtual server is a projection of a physical server that can run with its own operating system, hosting applications and hold network files. A virtual server can co-exist with many other virtual servers within a single host machine.

Let’s take a quick look into what physical servers are and some issues they face:

  • Both physical and virtual servers are designed to serve resources such as an application or files over a LAN (local area network) to your office computers or within a datacenter.
  • Physical servers are larger computers that come built with powerful processors, large hard disks and a large amount of memory, which often have more than one of each component.
  • They are considered to be the “workhorses” of the physical computer world. As a result, they’ll use up a lot more power and resources from its own components.
  • From time to time, this can lead them to have hardware faults such as disk failures, overheating from faulty fans or chip creek (components such as memory cards displaced by heat).
  • These noisy machines are usually located in the server room, stacked on a rack next to a number of other servers, requiring a considerable amount of space and power.

With the problems given above, here’s how virtual servers can help solve these issues, and more:

1. Highly resourceful

Physical servers would generally run with one application, to prevent any issues with running multiple programs at once. This would cause servers to sprawl out in numbers, without using them to their full potential. This is different with virtualized servers, where space isn’t an issue and they can be set separately with the required programs. The recommended resources can also be configured to prevent unnecessary waste of any given resources (disk space, memory. Processor power, etc…) that can be reallocated to another server.

2. Improved Disaster recovery

Virtualization eliminates the need of having replicas of physical servers or disks, with specific model numbers and brands, to carry out data recovery successfully.
A whole site can be replicated easily, being much more affordable in a virtualized environment. Disaster recovery failover can be tested to see if it works, instead of hoping it recovers in a real-life situation or in a disaster recovery testing center.

3. Environmentally Friendly

It goes without saying, less physical servers will mean less power used, as you can pack in many virtual servers in on host machine. This has the added benefit of making more space in a server room. In turn, less power used leads to lower energy costs. This helps reduce a business’ carbon footprint, whilst saving you money.

4. Efficient provisioning and management

You can quickly and easily clone virtual servers, restore or create new ones, at a moment’s notice. You can create virtual machines that will hold legacy applications that may no longer be in support. This can help smooth any server operations that require migration, upgrades, mimic legacy setups, which you can no longer acquire and so forth. Even test labs can be set up to keep things separate from a live environment. It will promote uptime, maintaining business operations as normal.

5. Moving to the Cloud

“The Cloud” may sound like an abstract concept, mainly due to it being a virtual network resource. However, businesses are opting towards new ways of accessing resources; therefore a move to virtualized servers can seem like the next logical step. The Cloud can be either public or private. With the amount of server resources required at a data center to host a Cloud network, a virtual infrastructure would be more sustainable and practical than a physical one.

Virtual servers will soon replace the remaining physical ones out there. It is likely than within five years the shift to a virtual infrastructure will be the norm in many businesses. The top four virtualization vendors to look at are Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware.

For more information on how virtualizing your servers can help save costs and streamline your business, contact your local IT professionals.

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Virtualizing Desktops
Virtualizing Desktops

Benefits of Virtualizing Desktops and Workstations

Office IT
05
Dec 2014

Virtualizing Desktops

Virtualization is fast becoming the norm in many small to large sized businesses. Here are some benefits when you virtualize office desktops.

With so many benefits to virtualizing desktops and workstations, it’s no surprise as to why this has caught on so well.

How does virtualization fit within a Small Business?

First, a quick recap on the meaning of virtualization. Virtualization is imitating a physical machine set-up, which has an OS (operating system).  Imagine taking your laptop or desktop, and running it on top of another computer called a host.  This host can run many desktops or laptops, eliminating the need for expensive physical computers.

What is virtualization

  • In the context of virtualized desktops, a centralized server acts as the host to hold the virtual desktop sessions, which imitate real desktops just like your Windows 7 or 8 based computers, complete with a whole list of different applications.
  • Staff and users would then access their files and programs via their terminal machines, from which they log in from, to initiate their virtual sessions to work.
  • The “connection” here involves the user gaining access to their operating system and programs, which are virtual. These exist on the host server, which allocates such sessions to logged in terminals.
  • A terminal machine can be a computer, Smart-phone, or a Thin-client.
  • A Thin-client differs greatly from a physical desktop system, in that they are physically designed to be basic, with much smaller memory, hard-disk space and processor. This makes them more streamlined and much smaller than real desktops.
  • Since Thin-clients are much smaller, the processing power demanded from any given applications or programs wouldn’t overload it as all that is taken care of by the server that hosts the session.
  • Host servers are generally built to withstand higher demands on their resources, such as memory, processors and Hard-disk space, which are generally much more powerful than a standard computer.

The Benefits of Virtualizing Desktops

Now that we’ve covered the concept of how a virtual desktops are set up in a VDI, let’s now understand the benefits behind virtualization.

Cost

  • Lowers admin and operating costs by as much as 70%! Operating costs can include repairing faulty or broken desktops, and extra man-hours to handle such requests, which are all mitigated by virtualized machines.
  • Thin clients and other terminal machines are significantly cheaper to run, helping you save on energy bills by around 97%, compared to physical desktops.
  • Since they save on energy costs, it has a positive impact on a company’s carbon footprint, making it more environmentally friendly. These savings can be reinvested back into the business and reallocated towards much needed projects.
  • Save on having to purchase large office furniture as they’ll be more room on desks, which also looks aesthetically better than having a clunky desktop to look at!

Management and Administration

  • Simple to manage centrally from a server at a datacenter. For instance this involves policies, security updates, changes to applications and so forth.
  • Reduces the number of issues logged with IT staff, unlike physical desktops which may have isolated issues and can be difficult to track within a large company.
  • Keeps downtime to a minimum, as it’s all managed centrally and more efficiently, which in turn helps with productivity.
  • Backups of user’s laptops, devices and profiles are simple to manage, for instance backups are carried out centrally.
  • Easy to clone VMs ( virtual machines), for an entire department or company, as they’ll contain  all the settings including its operating systems, drivers, applications and files. This saves time and man-hours too!

Security

  • End terminals and Thin-clients are locked down, making them more secure from unauthorized virus threats and policy breaches.
  • Prevents data leaks by not allowing information to be copied to a disk. All copies are usually only available via the datacenter as backups.
  • Centralized management via a host server means simple processing and monitoring for both sessions and end terminals.

Productivity

  • As previously mentioned, increased productivity is a highly noted benefit. Gone are the days where you would have to wait for a Desktop to be repaired, which would interrupt workflow. Issues can be resolved very quickly, meaning business can continue as usual.
  • Easy to set up new virtual machines, which can be preconfigured and customized VMs for any department, and ready to use in a matter of minutes. Thus makes it incredibly easy to scale up system, when needed. This can allow new staff to be set up quickly and be productive too!
  • Users can access the same programs and applications from anywhere they can log in.

Final Thoughts

A virtualized desktop environment comes with so many benefits that it’s hard to ignore. The ease of implementing and managing all virtual machines securely and reliably through one host, lends itself mostly this new technology model.

Administrators will also benefit greatly, as there would be an orderly Virtual system which is straightforward to monitor and secure. Staff are able to have the flexibility to work from home. With a VDI being considerably economical, this makes it a highly viable solution for small to large businesses.  The leading virtualization vendors to consider include Citrix, VMware and Microsoft.

For more ways virtualization can help secure and streamline your technology, contact your local IT professionals.

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What is Virtualization?

Network, Office IT,
25
Nov 2014

What_is_virtualization

Virtualization is gaining popularity in many businesses.  What is virtualization and will the benefits help you streamline and protect your business?

The idea of a machine not being physical may sound like a bizarre idea.  Here is an easy breakdown of virtualization:

  • In simple terms, virtualization is a virtual representation of something that can be physical like a desktop, server, storage device or another physical resource.
  • Just like your desktop or laptop computer, a virtual machine will perform and behave just like a real physical one.
  • When a computer is virtualized, it is no longer running on hardware like your desktop or laptop computer.  Instead many computers can run on one system.
  • For virtualization to be possible, there needs to exist a physical machine, which is known as a host.
  • A host will hold a virtualized guest machine. For example, you can have a Windows computer that can host a virtual machine running Linux on it. Both systems can co-exist within the same machine running completely separate from each other.
  • The software or firmware used to manage the virtual machine is known as Virtual machine Manager or a hypervisor.

virtual_vs_physical_system

Virtualization can be classified into three categories.

  1. Full virtualization. Nearly all of hardware is simulated. It runs complete with its own guest OS, and it runs unchanged.
  2. Partial virtualization. Only a portion of the environment is virtualized and a little configuration needs to be applied to some of the guest programs in order for them to run.
  3. Paravirtualization. In this setup, only the guest programs are virtual and run within their own boundaries, as if running on a completely different system. The programs run by the “guest” need configuring in order to run in such an environment.

Where it all started

IBM_704_mainframe

It first existed during the 60s on, what was known as, mainframes, which were huge heavy duty machines, much like servers. These mainframes used virtualization to split up the machines resources to run various applications. From then on, virtualization has evolved to what it has become today.  Whole operating systems with applications can be virtualized allowing individual users to interact with an entire system for themselves.

Benefits of virtualization

Now that we have a better understanding about the whole virtualization concept, we can briefly look at some of the main benefits to virtualizing a system.

Space saving–  Think about how much space you’ll save in a computer equipment room by having one single machine running multiple virtual machines. For instance. these can run servers to fulfill an entire business. An example of a hardware reducing ratio, by VMWare, is 10:1. All this will considerably change your server architecture.

Maximizing server efficiency– Within each virtual server in the host, you can seamlessly run multiple applications as well as different operating systems.

Reduces costs– By having less physical machines to purchase and maintain, you save a considerable amount of electricity, whilst helping to maximize productivity on servers and allowing business operations to run smoothly.

Easy to mange applications and resources– Migrations can happen whilst on a live environment, servers can be cloned at the click of a button, easy to set up load balancing over virtual farm servers and it’s easy to scale.

Final Thoughts

There exists a handful of leading virtualization vendors who offer different solutions according to your business and infrastructure needs. Some of the big names include VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V and the like.

Do you use a Virtualization platform? If so, let us know what you think and how you rate it.

To determine whether virtualization can help streamline your business’ productivity, contact your local IT professionals.

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