A managed service is the practice of transferring day-to-day operations and responsibility to a third party, such as a managed services provider. This is a strategic method of improved, effective and efficient operation of the IT infrastructure of any company or organization.
A managed services provider (MSP), is typically an information technology (IT) services provider, who manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of services to their clients either proactively or as they determine that the services are needed. Most MSPs bill a flat or near-fixed monthly fee, which benefits their clients by providing them with predictable IT support costs.
Advantages
Access to new technology: Using managed services, you are eligible for all the updates and upgrades of the software and applications that you are using. Also with a click of a button you can use any new application that is provided by the MSP (Managed Service Provider).
Lower cost of ownership: Instead of investing in IT equipment, bandwidth and IT staff, companies can take advantage of the Web-based applications through managed services and focus on core activities. The technology is owned and managed by the service provider, and is therefore constantly updated and maintained, in consequence, saving companies many of the unpredictable costs and risks that are related with upgrades, patches and maintaining the Information Technology staff to run the software. Total Costof Ownership (TCO) is much lower compared to premise-based solutions since hardware and software costs are reduced signifigantly.
Improved service and support: Organizations using managed services, can deploy by themselves any application, anytime without waiting from an IT person to respond to their request since all the applications are offered as a service and on-demand.
Flexibility: With managed services technology, organizations have the flexibility to grow without the need of altering their inhouse equipment. Everything is offered on-demand.
No maintenance costs: All the costs in relation with maintenance and support, do not apply when you are using managed services. The maintenance and supprot costs are included in the monthly flat-rate.
Backup: Backup Service is fully available from every MSP. There is no need to worry about your backups. The MSP is doingt his for you based on the agreement that you have.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
Monday, October 4, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
How virtualization can save costs for your business
Virtualization is a method of partitioning one physical server into many “virtual” servers. Each virtual server has the appearance and capabilities of a stand-alone machine. Using virtualization, your business is gaining several benefits that are explained in the following paragraphs.
1. Hardware savings: Using virtualization, your business saves on the purchases of new hardware. Since many server can reside on one physical server means that you save on the purchases of hardware.
2. Power savings: Due to the fact that several servers can run on one physical server, power consumption will be much less. Over the past few years large and medium sized organization are virtualizing their data centers in order to cut their power costs.
3. High utilization: Physical servers have very low utilization. Approximatelly, all physical servers in a corporate enviroment are using 10% of their resources even in heavy-workload enviroments. Using virtualization you can utilize the 90% of resources that are used very rarely. Basically, virtualization allows you to use more of what you already have.
4. Easy management: Before virtualization it was a very time-consuming task to configure and setup a new server. However, with virtualization, what once took hours can now be done in minutes. Not only can new servers be brought online quickly, but they can be broken down, rearranged, reassigned and redeployed to suit the needs of the organization.
5. Easy recovery: Recovery of data and systems is one of the most time consuming processes in Information Technology field. However, using virtualization disaster recovery or data recovery is an easy task since it is very easy to have a full backup of every server reside in the organization and it is a matter of minutes to restore it.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
1. Hardware savings: Using virtualization, your business saves on the purchases of new hardware. Since many server can reside on one physical server means that you save on the purchases of hardware.
2. Power savings: Due to the fact that several servers can run on one physical server, power consumption will be much less. Over the past few years large and medium sized organization are virtualizing their data centers in order to cut their power costs.
3. High utilization: Physical servers have very low utilization. Approximatelly, all physical servers in a corporate enviroment are using 10% of their resources even in heavy-workload enviroments. Using virtualization you can utilize the 90% of resources that are used very rarely. Basically, virtualization allows you to use more of what you already have.
4. Easy management: Before virtualization it was a very time-consuming task to configure and setup a new server. However, with virtualization, what once took hours can now be done in minutes. Not only can new servers be brought online quickly, but they can be broken down, rearranged, reassigned and redeployed to suit the needs of the organization.
5. Easy recovery: Recovery of data and systems is one of the most time consuming processes in Information Technology field. However, using virtualization disaster recovery or data recovery is an easy task since it is very easy to have a full backup of every server reside in the organization and it is a matter of minutes to restore it.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Cloud computing
The definition from Wikipedia is that “cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet”. Cloud computing offers services such as applications (word processing, spreadsheets, CRM, etc) and virtual data centre facilities with the main advantage of lower pricing. The “backbone” of cloud computing is based on virtualization technology and this is the reason that these services have lower costs than purchasing your own hardware or software..
Nowadays, everybody uses cloud computing resources, even though most of us do not know it. Cloud computing is a new term, not only for IT professionals but for all of us since with one way or another everybody uses computers and this term is everywhere. This term corresponds to a new style of computing that resources are provided as a service through Internet. Using these services, users do not need to have any knowledge, expertise or control in regards with the “cloud” that supports them.
However, often, “cloud” services are provided by virtualized resources. Computing power has become so cheap nowadays that you have the ability to take things that exist physically as hardware and turn them into software. Using this technology, companies have the advantage of having “more with less”. For example, a small company that has five servers, it is able to virtualize all of them using only the hardware of one server. This technology corresponds to huge advantages such as less space, less power costs, less cooling costs and better manageability.
Eric Schmidt, current CEO of Google said in 1993 that when the network becomes faster than the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads through the network. Basically, this is the logic behind cloud computing and this is how Internet is becoming now. All the users are sharing a virtual computer through Internet and everybody can tap into it and use it with much less cost than before.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that companies have realized the great advantages that might have using this technology and this is one of the reasons that cloud computing is not widely used yet. Companies that use cloud computing and virtualization currently, are considered technologically advanced even though virtualization also simplifies the data centre of an organization.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
Nowadays, everybody uses cloud computing resources, even though most of us do not know it. Cloud computing is a new term, not only for IT professionals but for all of us since with one way or another everybody uses computers and this term is everywhere. This term corresponds to a new style of computing that resources are provided as a service through Internet. Using these services, users do not need to have any knowledge, expertise or control in regards with the “cloud” that supports them.
However, often, “cloud” services are provided by virtualized resources. Computing power has become so cheap nowadays that you have the ability to take things that exist physically as hardware and turn them into software. Using this technology, companies have the advantage of having “more with less”. For example, a small company that has five servers, it is able to virtualize all of them using only the hardware of one server. This technology corresponds to huge advantages such as less space, less power costs, less cooling costs and better manageability.
Eric Schmidt, current CEO of Google said in 1993 that when the network becomes faster than the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads through the network. Basically, this is the logic behind cloud computing and this is how Internet is becoming now. All the users are sharing a virtual computer through Internet and everybody can tap into it and use it with much less cost than before.
Nevertheless, I do not believe that companies have realized the great advantages that might have using this technology and this is one of the reasons that cloud computing is not widely used yet. Companies that use cloud computing and virtualization currently, are considered technologically advanced even though virtualization also simplifies the data centre of an organization.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
Friday, June 4, 2010
Overview
For the last two years, virtualization came into play from a poorly understood concept to a hyped industry buzzword. Even though other technologies are expensive and cannot be used by small businesses, virtualization is a mature technology which provides a layer of hardware abstraction that every organization can benefit.
Virtualization refers to virtualizing Operating systems. Wikipedia uses the term “platform virtualization” since the main concept of virtualization is to run an abstraction layer on a computer that emulates the hardware itself. With the combination of abstraction and emulation, a virtual machine is created, which is a full “workable” computer with the same facilities and functionality as a dedicated machine has.
However, the main advantage of virtualization is to have many virtual machines (full “workable”) into one physical machine. As Dan Chu said, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMWare, “Virtualization enables one server or computer to act as many”.
Advantages
Any size of business can benefit from any kind or scale of virualization. Some of these benefits are the following:
Reducing power consumption: IT virtualization has the ability to reduce significantly power consumption hence is considered as a “green” technology. It is considered as a “reducing consumption technology” since instead of have several dedicated machines running one operating system each, you can have many machines reside on one physical.
Cost reductions: This is one of the main advantages of virtualization since it is the main reason that companies migrating to virtual devices. Minimizing the costs of purchasing expensive hardware and avoiding the running expenses of several server machine, we can now deploy more systems at a lower cost per system.
Ease of provisioning: Installing and configuring a new server on a new piece of hardware it is a very time consuming process, hence, using virtualization it is a matter of minutes to install and configure new servers.
Reduce operating expenses: Maintenance and administration costs are reduced since there is less hardware to maintain. Instead of having many physical servers to maintain, one physical server hosts many virtual which correspods to less administration.
More responsive IT staff: Especially for large organizations, IT staff can be more responsive since virtualization simplifies the IT infrastructure of the organization. IT staff is able to help the organization in a more business oriented IT strategy and not to keep the current systems up and running since with using virtualization, all the day-to-day operations are more simplified. Standardization: All the virtualization software runs on any AMD and Intel platforms, no matter what operating system you use.
Resource accesibility: Using virtualization technology, all the physical resources are used including CPU, memory, storage, etc. However, virtualization helps your organization to use all the available hardware resources.
Efficiency: Since multiple machines are running on a single physical server, your hardware is fully utilized.
Mobility: Virtual machines can be provisioned, backed up and restored very easily with the minimum downtime.
Flexibility: The IT team of your organization can continue and support older but mission-critical applications using virtual machines.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
For the last two years, virtualization came into play from a poorly understood concept to a hyped industry buzzword. Even though other technologies are expensive and cannot be used by small businesses, virtualization is a mature technology which provides a layer of hardware abstraction that every organization can benefit.
Virtualization refers to virtualizing Operating systems. Wikipedia uses the term “platform virtualization” since the main concept of virtualization is to run an abstraction layer on a computer that emulates the hardware itself. With the combination of abstraction and emulation, a virtual machine is created, which is a full “workable” computer with the same facilities and functionality as a dedicated machine has.
However, the main advantage of virtualization is to have many virtual machines (full “workable”) into one physical machine. As Dan Chu said, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMWare, “Virtualization enables one server or computer to act as many”.
Advantages
Any size of business can benefit from any kind or scale of virualization. Some of these benefits are the following:
Reducing power consumption: IT virtualization has the ability to reduce significantly power consumption hence is considered as a “green” technology. It is considered as a “reducing consumption technology” since instead of have several dedicated machines running one operating system each, you can have many machines reside on one physical.
Cost reductions: This is one of the main advantages of virtualization since it is the main reason that companies migrating to virtual devices. Minimizing the costs of purchasing expensive hardware and avoiding the running expenses of several server machine, we can now deploy more systems at a lower cost per system.
Ease of provisioning: Installing and configuring a new server on a new piece of hardware it is a very time consuming process, hence, using virtualization it is a matter of minutes to install and configure new servers.
Reduce operating expenses: Maintenance and administration costs are reduced since there is less hardware to maintain. Instead of having many physical servers to maintain, one physical server hosts many virtual which correspods to less administration.
More responsive IT staff: Especially for large organizations, IT staff can be more responsive since virtualization simplifies the IT infrastructure of the organization. IT staff is able to help the organization in a more business oriented IT strategy and not to keep the current systems up and running since with using virtualization, all the day-to-day operations are more simplified. Standardization: All the virtualization software runs on any AMD and Intel platforms, no matter what operating system you use.
Resource accesibility: Using virtualization technology, all the physical resources are used including CPU, memory, storage, etc. However, virtualization helps your organization to use all the available hardware resources.
Efficiency: Since multiple machines are running on a single physical server, your hardware is fully utilized.
Mobility: Virtual machines can be provisioned, backed up and restored very easily with the minimum downtime.
Flexibility: The IT team of your organization can continue and support older but mission-critical applications using virtual machines.
Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Manager
Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC
http://www.neocleous.com
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