Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware. Virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments.

By virtualizing multiple workloads onto a single platform you can reduce your physical server requirement, allowing you to fully support your business with less hardware, resulting in lower equipment costs, maintenance and physical space requirements. You have all of the benefits of installing a physical server, but at a greatly reduced cost.

Virtualization Categories

Our virtualization offerings fall into 2 categories:

• On-Demand
• On-Demand machines are ideal for use in Disaster Recovery scenarios, remaining offline until you need them, at which point they are bought online and are ready for use.


• Always-On
• Always-On machines perform exactly as described - they run 24/7, so you can access them whenever you need. They provide all of the functionality offered by on-demand machines, but also enjoy additional features including dedicated network cards and secure remote web access.

Our Capabilities

We can provide you with as many virtual machines as you require, with no restrictions placed on how you use them, and each machine comes with full support for hardware peripherals (including USB devices). Each virtual machine is completely isolated, so any data on a machine is guaranteed to be secure.

Optional access to our private Customer Network is available, so your machines can talk to our network and access resources such as our FTP storage or printers. We also perform complete machine backups, to ensure the integrity of every virtual machine we host.

Always-on machines can be provided with a dedicated, physical network card so you can have a private, secure internet connection to your own machines should you require. We also provide secure web access to Always-On machines, so you can connect to and control your virtual machines as though you were situated in front of them.

Virtualization Platforms

We support both VMWare and Microsoft virtual environments enabling us to transfer or replicate almost any existing virtualized environments you may have.

VMWare

As virtualization is now a critical component to an overall IT strategy, it is important to choose the right vendor. VMware is the leading virtualization provider, offering the most trusted and reliable platform for building internal cloud infrastructures and federating to external clouds. VMware’s server, desktop and application virtualization products let you eliminate planned downtime, ensure data protection, deliver high availability and be better prepared for disaster recovery.

VMware is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter — bringing cloud computing to businesses of all sizes. Customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green.

VMware offers a wide range of award-winning virtualization products, from free software for virtualizing desktops and servers to comprehensive enterprise-class platforms for optimizing datacenters and IT infrastructure.

(source: VMWare)

Microsoft

At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize cost savings and improve business continuity. Their solutions address both physical and virtual infrastructure, and can be easily managed through a single console.

Microsoft virtualization solutions are based on familiar Windows interfaces and work with well-known Windows-based technologies. And because the solutions are Windows-based, they are supported by a broad network of experienced partners who can rapidly respond to your business needs.

With Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, as a role, plus flexible licensing policies, it's now easier than ever to take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization through Windows Server 2008. This enables you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine and also efficiently run multiple different operating systems — Windows, Linux, and others — in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of 64-bit computing.

(source: Microsoft Virtualization)