Bank branches, retail chains, regional offices--these are remote sites for larger enterprises, and as such, have limited to no IT staff and depend on a central corporate location for most IT support. These central locations face various challenges: reducing hardware and maintenance costs, quickly provisioning new servers, guaranteeing data protection, and providing business continuity with maximum uptime.
Virtualization provides tremendous benefits that are designed to mitigate these challenges. Recent Microsoft surveys* found that close to three-quarters of U.S. retailers and a majority of tier-one banks are turning to virtualization.
If you work in a central corporate location, there are several ways to address virtualization for remote/branch offices. You can centralize services where servers and desktops are virtualized at the datacenter and applications are served to the remote offices over WAN. You can use hybrid services approach where services are centralized with local copies or caching mechanisms available at the remote office, complemented with use of WAN Optimization technologies. You can virtualize servers and desktops locally at the remote offices and manage them centrally from the datacenter.
Microsoft has a range of products designed for remote/branch offices. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V lets you consolidate multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine, to improve server utilization. Windows Server 2008 capabilities, such as clustering and quick migration, provide a cost-effective business continuity solution. System Center management products enable rapid provisioning and centralized management of virtual machines, plus improved availability at remote offices with data protection and targeted backup and recovery. Microsoft Desktop Virtualization solutions enable remote office users to access desktop applications from shared client devices while data is stored centrally and highly securely. Microsoft partners provide WAN Optimization solutions that help remote offices optimize WAN bandwidth.
With solutions from Microsoft and its partners, remote/branch offices can enjoy these benefits:
* Microsoft Virtualization in Retail Survey 2008 and Microsoft Virtualization in Banking Survey 2008, conducted by KRC Research
