Virtualization and infrastructure consolidation can offer significant benefits for both IT and business operations. The cost savings and administrative efficiencies are the main reasons why organizations are looking to consolidate and move to a virtual infrastructure en masse. While clearly beneficial, organizations should always give careful consideration to the performance and availability requirements for their businesses, and look to a leading WDS solution to address challenges in accessing centralized data and applications.

The combination of WDS solutions along with virtualization offers CIOs the unique opportunity to strategically enable their IT operations, and improve service delivery while saving costs at the same time. IT managers would be well served to consider both technologies as key components of the IT infrastructure going forward.

This paper examines the trends towards server consolidation and virtualization, and how wide-area data services (WDS) can help IT organizations address the challenges of application performance and information availability within these environments. Furthermore, the paper discusses the combined strategic capability of both technologies in enabling infrastructure flexibility for forward-looking IT managers.