With Application Infrastructure Virtualization, Less Is More

That's a staggering sum from any perspective. Application infrastructure virtualization can be an important step toward putting those unutilized processing assets to work.  Application infrastructure virtualization enables data center administrators to dynamically adjust resources across the infrastructure. Think of it as being able to do what data centers have been able to do in the mainframe for years and to extend that capability across a heterogeneous distributed enterprise.

Just how does application infrastructure virtualization help you lower costs? First, there are the obvious and immediate savings:

•         Lowers administrative and planned maintenance expenses

•         Greatly improves the utilization of existing application servers

•         Reduces the need for new servers in the data center

•         Reduces the number of software licenses to pay for and monitor

•         Recaptures valuable space for more productive uses

•         Increases power and cooling efficiencies  

It also delivers longer-term value for your enterprise applications and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment:

•         Achieves high quality of services that ensure the health of applications, services, and associated processes

•         Increases application availability and ensures resiliency

•         Improves response time and performance through real-time visibility into application health for proactive response to potential performance issues

•         Rapidly deploys new applications and services

•         Better manages peak loads and responds to unforeseen demand

Combined Benefits of Application Infrastructure and Server Virtualization

Application infrastructure virtualization can be an important step toward putting underutilized application servers to work.  AIV enables data center administrators to dynamically adjust resources across the infrastructure and in doing so, eases the strains on infrastructure that peaks and valleys in demand for usage of services within a SOA environment.

It enhances the value organizations are receiving from physical server virtualization technologies such as IBM PowerVM, IBM z/VM, and VMware ESX Server as well as addressing the challenges of managing a virtual infrastructure in the following ways:

•         Extends the economic benefits of physical server virtualization by reducing virtual machine sprawl and consolidating application servers
in virtual machines

•         Ensures peaceful co-existence of multiple applications in virtual machines

•          Increases availability, performance, and resilience of virtual infrastructure

•          Improves scalability of virtual infrastructure

Figure 2. Combined Benefits of Application Infrastructure and Server Virtualization