Verizon virtualizes data centers

The VMware appliance checks each application and server every five minutes and analyzes usage and resources, Deacon said. Using this system, enterprises can reduce the number of servers they are using and prevent future purchases until they are absolutely necessary.

Verizon’s managed service can be used whether the servers are on the customers’ premises, at a Verizon data center or even at a competitor’s data center, Deacon added. Verizon Business can provide the assessment service or can manage the entire transition process including VMware software installation and movement of the applications software, he said.

“When you build an IT infrastructure, you have to build for the peak usage,” Deacon said. “But as energy costs are going up, data costs are going up. Using virtualization, we can build in redundancy because of VMware clustering – if a node fails, you can failover to another device, so you don’t have to have two of everything. And we can still have same uptime guarantees on a virtual machine that they would have gotten on a dedicated piece of hardware at a much reduced cost.”

In addition to reducing an enterprise carbon footprint, virtualization makes it easier to scale up or scale down resources depending on demand while still providing reduced downtime and automatic failover, Deacon said. “So if you need to do patching or scheduled maintenance, you can move an application off a physical device, do the work and then move it back.”