Virtualisation

In a nutshell

Virtualisation software is an abstraction layer between operating systems, applications and actual physical platforms. The operating system sees a consistent, uniform set of hardware no matter what components are in the physical machine.

When encapsulated in virtual machines, full systems (applications, OS, BIOS and virtual hardware) are easily transportable between different physical machines, because the Virtualisation layer isolates them from the change of platform.

Virtualisation is a form of partitioning because multiple virtual machines can be run simultaneously on the same physical platform, unaware and essentially unaffected by the presence of other virtual machines.

“Even more amazing than the product’s efficiency was the way it reduced our costs. Adopting server virtualisation saved us thousands of dollars within a year on hardware purchases alone. As Mitie Group grows, we anticipate even greater savings.” – Peter Stock, IT Manager, Mitie Group.

Development and Test optimization

CIO’s are under constant pressure to deliver high quality enterprise applications more quickly at a lower cost. While delivering quality software on time and on budget has never been easy, the task is further complicated by modern multi-tier architectures and multiple versions of operating systems, browsers, and firewalls.

Using a Virtualisation platform for development and
testing results in immediate improvement in time to
market, costs, and quality.

Key benefits of Virtualisation

Virtualisation and Server Consolidation

Virtualisation enables enterprises to:

• Consolidate servers and desktops used in production and development environments
  
• Reduce costs by lowering the number of phyiscal servers while increasing hardware utilisation
  
• Support complex mult-tier applications on a single physical platform.

Improved Storage Access

The SAN becomes a pooled resource that hosts
operating systems (encapsulated) and data
providing greatly improved realiability and
avaliability of services.

Costs are reduced because servers effectively share fewer ports and cards to access pooled resources.

Business Continuity & DR

Each year hundreds of data centres worldwide will experience significant unplanned service
interruptions. Using virtual infrastructure, IT
managers can improve all aspects of business
continuity & DR by realising:

• Faster, more flexible, and more reliable disaster recovery at a lower cost achieved through the removal of dependencies of operating systems on specific server hardware
  
• Copy production environments into virtual machines for testing and share complete
  environments amoung different teams
  
• Simplified and repeatable processes for implementing business continuity solutions enabled by hardware independence.

Lower total cost of ownership

ADC delivers up to 80 percent savings in training, power, space and overall costs. It delivers more applications to more users while reducing server costs by up to 60 percent. ADC offloads intensive and repetitive tasks off servers, holds dynamic content generated by servers in in-memory cache and shields servers from unwanted traffic. This reduces the number of servers and network devices, and allows you to deploy new Web 2.0 applications without extensive infrastructure changes.

Improved operational efficiency

As enterprises grow, IT need to rapidly increase bandwidth and computing capacity – often in the form of increased Internet capacity, IT services support and server resources. The resulting expenditures are costly in terms of capital and people needed to operate and manage delivery
infrastructures.

Intelligent Load Balancing and Content Switching

ADC’s provides comprehensive layer 4-7 traffic
management. Deployed in front of application servers, they deliver fine-grained load balancing of client requests to ensure optimal distribution of traffic. Intelligent traffic management and extensive server health checks provide greater business continuity and eliminate the application server as a single point of failure. It is easy to define traffic management policies based on layer 4 traffic information (protocol and port number), as well as application-layer information such as URLs, application data type or cookie.

Guard against Denial of Service Attacks

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are assaults on a network that flood it with so many additional requests that regular traffic is either slowed or completely interrupted

ADC solutions provide intelligent Layer 4 / Layer 7 DoS and surge protection to ensure your web services are robust and available

Make Computrad your first choice
for Virtualisation

Computrad has implemented load balancing and
application delivery controllers for a wide range of company sizes and industry types globally. We have deployed and managed for the US Military, manufacturing companies, government, law firms, charities, universities and shipping ports.

Computrad has the finest load balancing capabilities, we are experienced design consultants and technical staff who are trained in the implementation and support.

Our experts are vendor agnostic so we can provide objective non-biased solutions – you can be assured of a solution that is tailored to your requirements based on the optimum configuration of hardware, software and specialist services.

ADC requires expertise across the entire life of the project if you are to gain the full benefit.
Computrad provides full end to end integration services from consulting, planning, design, project management builds, implementation.

The right solution for a wide range of problems

Whether you are looking for an easier way to deliver your web applications, reduce costs, improve Disaster Recovery, better utilise and/or consolidate your server infrastructure, there is an ADC solution for your business.