According to the Harvard Business Review, while 65% of technology salespeople were confident about selling the cloud, less than 20% were as confident about selling virtualisation. It’s definitely an area that customers are interested in, too.
So what is virtualisation?
Virtualisation refers to the creation of a virtual form of something, rather than a physical one. Typically, that’s a virtual hardware platform, operating system, storage device or network resource.
What are the benefits?
Migrating physical servers to virtual machines and consolidating them onto fewer physical servers lowers monthly power and cooling costs in the data center, as well as reducing the amount of space physically required. Server virtualisation also delivers the flexibility to quickly provision additional resources – you can have another server up and running within minutes when necessary.
What’s changed?
Recent advances in virtualisation have included storage migration, which allows you to move a running VM or storage between different physical machines without disconnecting the client or application, fault tolerance, high availability and disaster recovery.
What’s the difference between virtualisation and the cloud?
While both virtualisation and the cloud aim to optimise IT infrastructure, they are not the same. Virtualisation is part of the physical infrastructure. It’s the allocation of resources: OS, memory, storage, networks, etc; to virtual machines.
In contrast, cloud is a technique that delivers the resources as a service to end users using the Internet.
Will you be selling virtualisation during 2014? Leave a comment and let us know.
If you’re an experienced technology salesperson, we could have the job for you. View our current vacancies at Hays Sales to find out more.
