Why the Infrasupport virtualization approach is best

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Great.  You’ve gone through the exercise and decided a virtualization project might make sense.  How can Infrasupport help get past the perceived impediments you will face?

  1. Nobody likes IT projects because they never deliver what they promise,
  2. IT upgrades are always disruptive,
  3. Virtualization technology is too expensive,
  4. Virtualization technology is immature and not ready yet for small business.

Here are a few thoughts.

Nobody likes IT projects because they never deliver what they promise

Guilty as charged.  But only sometimes.

Most IT projects fail because expectations are poorly set, management and end users are not involved in the implementation, and communication breaks down.  All IT companies make promises about how their better methodologies and communication strategies mitigate these problems.  Some of these promises may even be true.

But here is where the rubber meets the road.  Infrasupport generally bids virtualization projects on a fixed price basis.  This only works when everyone agrees on what is being delivered and who has responsibility for what.  Bottom line, Infrasupport only gets paid when the customer agrees the system delivers what it’s supposed to deliver.  No more powerful incentive exists to getting it right.

IT upgrades are always disruptive

Guilty as charged.  Except for the “always” part.

A great metaphor for an IT project is changing the car engine while roaring down the highway in heavy traffic.  One of the greatest challenges in the IT industry is, how to do improvements without breaking what’s already in place.  IT professionals lose significant amounts of sleep on this.

But we have some tricks up our sleeves at Infrasupport to reduce the hassle.

Virtualization projects are not necessarily application upgrades.  With many such projects, the first step is a physical to virtual (P2V) migration of your existing servers.  After a successful P2V, your new virtual servers should behave bug for bug the same as your old physical servers.

Now, with the servers virtualized, we can use snapshots, clones, and other nifty virtualization technology to test and degug upgrades before turning them loose on end users.  A virtualization project, done right, will reduce the ongoing hassle of future upgrades.

Virtualization technology is too expensive

Not necessarily.

The Red Hat open source approach will cut your software cost by up to 80 percent without any functionality or support tradeoffs.  This makes it affordable.

Virtualization projects with redundancy require more hardware than traditional server installations.  But the redundancy can be phased in over time to reduce the immediate capital cost burden.

Infrasupport can implement virtualization projects using the legacy software approach with software from the market share leader.  We have the appropriate certifications end expertise, just like everyone else in the IT service industry.  We can build the same virtualization projects as everyone else, the same way everyone else does it.

But we can also do better.  Much better.

Infrasupport is an expert with a new way to do virtualization, called RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization).   We could write a book about RHEV (and we might some day), but for now, one sentence sums it up.  In 6 short years, Red Hat and the open source community have accomplished what the market share leaders and others took more than a dozen years to accomplish.  Imagine what will happen over the next 5 years.

Here is what Red Hat says about its virtualization technology.

Virtualization technology is immature and not ready yet for small business.

Pure hogwash.  (We want to use a stronger word here.)

While developing this page, we planned several paragraphs here to refute this objection.  But text on a website is worthless.  Just read a few case studies of real customers implementing these solutions in the real world and gaining real benefits.

Closer to home, here is how Infrasupport uses RHEV in its own operations.

And contact us to go into more depth.