Virtualisation is key to the future: The answer to many of todays IT headaches is reached through "virtualisation", if you have not experienced this before it's a secret you'll soon be very excited about! Virtualisation is the ability to build a "virtual" computer or server, that is one that doesn't physically exist but is hosted inside an existing machine/platform. This may seem very confusing, but let's try break it down to a few examples:

Scenario 1

We need a file server, a mail server, a digital phone server, a firewall server, the list seems to go on and on, but each of these is an additonal piece of hardware, that needs purchasing, maintaining, upgrading, takes power, generates noise and heat, is a potential for faliure!

Virtualisation is perfect for this, it allows you to run several "virtual" servers on a single "physical" machine, each server "thinks" it's running on it's own hardware yet really they are all wrapped up within the virtualisaion software, sharing out the host server and fooling each session into thinking they have the machine all for themselves!

Scenario 2

We can't afford downtime, want backups of all our servers or a quick way to recover in a disaster, but don't want to double-up on all the hardware we have!

With virtualisaiton you not only need less physical servers, but servers become "hardware-independant", so you need less redundant equiptment on standby in case of an emergency!

Scenario 3

Some of our desktop users use mission critial applications, we can't afford them to crash or want to protect against their computers failing, how?

Virtual Desktops are the answer, you can quickly use any desktop of any power to access a remote window to your operating system running in a secure protected environment on your server.