Difficult Made Simple: Virtualization

In this modern computing world with multitudes of various trends and innovations, we sometimes find ourselves lost in between new technologies, terminologies and words. Why do we tend to make things more difficult than they have to be? That was my thought when I started a set of blog posts describing the new computing trends in a simple way. Here is another trend that I would like to simplify – virtualization.

Virtualized environments continue to grow in popularity with real implications when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery, but many IT organizations still think that only physical data is important to protect.  

Let’s start with the quick analogy to simplify the virtualization concept:

Consider the subway trains that bring you to work every day. These rapid transit systems around the world serve millions of people on daily basis. Each of the busiest transport systems, be it Tokyo, Moscow, Shanghai, New York, etc. transports around 2 billion passengers every single year. What if public transportation has never been invented and we all had to drive our own cars to work? Our roads would be much wider, we would have to build multitudes of new lanes, produce more cars, extract more gas, etc. Just think how much more valuable time you would spend in traffic jams!

The introduction of public transport systems saved us a lot of resources compared to every passenger driving their own vehicle. One subway train, while being more expensive than one car, comes across much cheaper than infrastructure, time and gas for a thousand of passengers that it transports to different destinations every day.

Virtualization is like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where the physical host is a subway train and virtual machines are the passengers of this train. Introducing  virtualization to any business assumes that multiple computers running on their own hardware will eventually be moved to a single server that might cost more- but will be powerful enough to handle all the computing systems at once. Instead of maintaining, upgrading, fixing tens and hundreds of physical computers, IT administrator will end up serving only one that requires lesser time, knowledge and resources to be kept healthy.

Virtualization introduces some new backup and recovery requirements, as traditional backup no longer keeps up. IT organizations look for unified solutions that will support and protect their multi-hypervisor, hybrid physical and virtual environments, allow both data protection and disaster recovery, offer tools for physical to virtual migration – and while not finding any, leave their virtual data compromised.

Acronis offers one solution for  unified backup, data protection, disaster recovery and migration across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Supporting five different hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix XenServer and Parallels Server Bare Metal, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 also allows you to protect and centrally manage physical computers as well. Isn’t it something you have been looking for since you virtualized? Don’t miss your subway train.

Try a free 30-day trial of Acronis Backup & Recovery, now!